I think you guys are missing the point. The general idea behind no denying and skill shots is that you won't feel too outclassed by your opponent. Instead of thinking "his aim is so good", you think "my dodging is not good enough", instead of thinking "his last hitting is too good", you think "I'm not farming fast enough to keep up".
I was under the impression the idea behind removing denying was that it was unintuitive to new players. I vaguely remember reading a post about how it placed an undue burden of knowledge on the new player to know that these little people on their team can be killed by you for tangential rewards like preventing your opponent from gaining as much gold and for freezing your lane in place.
The rest of these... arguments I felt arose later when they got a lot of questions about it. I could be remembering it incorrectly, mind you, because I haven't followed their philosophies for over a year.
(Also, I find it a little insulting that a designer feels they need to remove game elements because they'll make me feel sad. It's something that irked me a lot with the designers posts. They viewed their audience as being sensitive children. Which, while probably is accurate, leads to rather restrictive game design.)
Riot has long struck me as being one of those "DESIGN IS LAW" studios, where immutable designer rules are more valuable than being flexible with regard to the unexpected and novel. Played the game for over a year and there's so much about it I've long since forgotten, nigh everything falls so close to the median line that there's precious little of Dota's peculiarity and outliers that gripped me.
This is something I felt too during my time with League. I felt like the designers had these pet peeves with Dota that they considered were bad but never really stopped to consider why they were implemented. So they designed a game removing everything they didn't like and ended up creating a ton of new problems they never anticipated.
But since they didn't understand the original design reasons for the things they banned, they had no idea why the issues were arising in their game.
For example - the passivity of the laning phase. I remember when I watched competitive matches the average kill total for the first ten to fifteen minutes was maybe around 5 or so. When they examined why this was happening, one of the big culprits was the prevalence of the Flash summoner skill. However, so many of their champions were designed with the utility of Flash in mind and the structure of their map required Flash to be in place they couldn't just remove it.
And for a year they said they were looking in to it and, to my knowledge, Flash is still a must have spell on every champion and the laning phase is still incredibly boring. I wonder if they ever got around to that stealth rework...
Oh yeah, I like denying. But on my list of problems with League, lack of denying isn't one of them.
My problem with removing denying was there was nothing added to compensate. In fact, they removed even more elements for controlling your lane like pulling jungle camps. This added to the incredibly boring laning phase of their game and, on a player level, the incredibly boring job of supporting. They saw something they didn't agree with it and said "let's get rid of it!" but never stopped to consider the consequences this would have on the overall game.
When you get down to brass tacks, denying is a really minor element of the game that adds quite a lot to the actual flow.
