(First off I want to start by saying that this is just me being logical I don't side with anyone in arguements, I also dont wany any beef)
Okay so, this is kind of a mess. Spammable manip is the only counter to air. That was always an intended mechanic, and as long as air retains its ability to fight the way it does, it will continue to be necessary. I'd also like to regard that earlier statement, every one of the top 5 waterbenders spam to some extent. And it's not a bad thing. While diversity is important, consistency is EQUALLY important. pk shouldnt be an exhaust your abilities wait 5 seconds and then go at it again... Bending would suck terribly, possibly the way it could end up in the future after disregaurding current metas... Numi you mentioned that when theres spam there's no diversity, what Andy was trying to get across is that there are multiple USES and ITERATIONS of spam in combat. You can position by attaining a position advantageous in regards to your opponent (behind them, farther yet away from yet within selectable range of source in relation to them). You can river in neutral, trading manips until someone lands a hit or begins a torrent and jump into position. You can accumulate a large number of manips and force your opponent into a defensive position and use mixups. You can chip away at stationary defense on spout through swift flybys, landing individual hits. You can defend from an island, which takes tremendous mechanical skill. You can bait onto land and use the position gained to deal your damage. You can fight land vs spout and attempt to get your opponent into the water for position.
So one of the biggest aspects of water is positioning. It's a very important mechanic, and without it water would have no real direction as you can see. So yeah that entire section there was only a piece of what manip ALONE plays into the meta. It's important. Basing mechanics around starting interactions through SINGLE moves, makes the flow of fights much more fluid and easier to enjoy. The important thing is making sure that addons like this take the meta in the right direction.
Maybe with this addon you could observe land vs land fights, trading off manips while running. This is VERY relevant to a lot of water fights in the show. The concept is canon and at the same time beneficial to the meta.
This whole conversation also brings me to another concept, being; instead of manip currently looks like when you create a ton of them (a loose conglomerate of lots of water) It could look more like a small version of waterflow, long, maybe 5-7 blocks, thick 1-3 with tapers. It could deal twice the damage of one manip used as an attack maybe adding something to the cooldown (configurable, suggested .5 seconds). But this could also play into defense. The stream could be used to block barrages of small attacks and single use strong attacks, could take idk 5 fireblasts and 2 charged fireblasts, one esmash 4 earthblasts etc etc. Ill go suggest this now :I