For completeness, let's talk about how Starcraft is a badly designed game.
But first, turns out pros were indeed underusing sentries and adepts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS8VcU882tw
Stalkers are shit units. Adepts with +glaive are, in fact, nearly as beefy as zealots, but mainly plain good against any player employing light units, like zerglings or marines. The only problem with a immortal/sentry army is inability to shoot up...but you have a warp prism, you can get emergency stalkers.
(Though the solution for zerg is to hold until they can muta flood, then....)
Cheeses are boring. You don't interact with the opponent until the attack hits. You just do the build you memorized, then there's a bit of actual play, then you either win or lose and the game is over.
Pros at least harass each other a bit during the early game, but the harass is always the same due to the very limited unit selection, making it still not an interaction. It's a ritual. Basically single-player.
On the ladder, easily the first 5-8 minutes of every game is tedious as fuck. Then you suddenly win or lose and the game is over. If there's no sudden winner, it will 100% come down to whoever macros better, i.e. faster or more efficiently.
Example. Consider a 12 minute game. This is the story of the game: I used templar storm, he didn't move his marines, so he lost and I won. What happened in the other 11:56 of the game? No playing, that's for certain. None of it mattered, except the fact he attacked after I had templar instead of before. Loading the map took longer than the total time that genuinely counted as play.
You do gain a few things due to leaving the early game open to player decisions, but not remotely close to how much you lose by doing so. Yes, you can finely adjust build orders and there's an infinite variety of cheeses - except both those things are bad games. They are boring and only boring.
Starcraft is not an RTS. Starcraft is a real-time cooking game. Imagine you're baking bread, you have to bake from memory, and you get points for getting it baked faster. Only you have to sit there and watch it rise. Every. Single. Time. You lose when, by trying to go fast, you mess up the recipe. That's Starcraft. That's, like, literally Starcraft with bread.
Starcraft "Skill" is overwhelmingly dominated by doing things quickly. It's a somewhat obfuscated game of whack-a-mole, so, whatever genre whack-a-mole is. Cooking whack-a-mole.
Insofar as there's strategy, you copy someone else's strategy. (As quickly as possible.) It's likely that fewer than a dozen boys or men total interact with the strategy layer of this alleged real-time ""strategy"" game. They make the strategies, everyone else uses the strategies - the strategists don't even get to play the game themselves at a high level, since the skillsets are so disparate.
The strategy layer is the only interesting part of the game.
Blizzard consciously, deliberately leaned into whack-a-mole. Units could be dramatically more automated than they are, but are dumb as rocks specifically so players can show off "skill" by doing stupid, repetitive tasks, but doing them very fast. FAL - factory assembly line game. Wage harder, wagie. It's a ""game"" so it's ""fun"" or something.
If the game goes long enough that a) you might go up the tech tree and see something other than copy-paste stalker/zergling wars and b) the mind-numbing setup phase is an acceptably low ratio of the total ""play"" time, it enters a new and exciting degenerate state. What "balanced" means is that even in Starcraft, security is affordable. You can deter attacks. Hence, it becomes about mining as quickly as possible, until the map is mined out and the players attack each other out of lack of anything better to do.
Consider this horrible fork: either you can scout and counter your opponent's composition, meaning your compositions will wash out and not matter, or you can be surprised and you lose due to pure chance. Blizzard chose to let players easily scout each other. Skirmisher skirts are not a thing.
Starcraft is basically an engagement game. It's about manoeuvring armies until you get a position that's favourable to your side. Except fights are balanced around playing on normal, and everyone plays on very fast due to the long, long stretches of utter tedium that necessarily occur before having an army to manoeuvre. Hence no human can react fast enough to meaningfully interact with the engagement. It's down to luck, and if you get the bad luck you have to retreat because it's too late to do anything else.
For example, Mechabellum is a drastically superior design. No mining, meaning no agonizing mining phase. No micro, meaning no enormous premium on your embroidery skills. Just...strategy. RNG starting "race" so the best strategy is unique (enough) to each game - if you can just copy someone's else's strategy, they nerf that strategy. E.g. vulcan+phoenix was a degenerate always-pick, so they fixed it. Bonus: without Blizzard's massive overreactions that have to be rolled back, then undershoot, then...
Mining in Starcraft makes sense in the campaign, where the conceit is that the enemy doesn't know you're there or doesn't consider you a real issue. E.g. you can challenge yourself to build the smallest viable winning army. Weapon and armour upgrades make sense in the campaign, because you (are supposed to) keep them across maps, creating a long/short tradeoff. As in real life, SC pvp weapon upgrades are a rat race. It's "balanced" if neither race can get ahead of the other, and letting your opponent out-research you is plain stupid. The only thing upgrades do is blunt certain rushes by effectively making the tech take longer. E.g. thermal lance.
For pvp, they moved in the right direction by changing starting workers from 6 to 12. Except it should be more like 90 starting workers and 20,000 starting minerals. Skip almost directly to the part where you have an army and are moving across the map. Perhaps skip bases entirely - just requisition an army pre-match and the game is entirely about manoeuvre. There's no gameplay in, "I built the wrong army so I lose," so just remove the option to build the wrong army.
