I highly recommend the Stimhack Cube if you don’t know how to build one.
Oddly enough, after reading through this thread, I feel better about Netrunner than I did before reading through it. Taking a step back, I feel like there is still a very wide variety of decks that can perform reasonably well in any given tournament on both sides, and with the increased numbers of asset spam and addition of Polop, Criminal looks like it can make a comeback. I’ll be interested to see how things shape up on Saturday with lots of regionals happening. Yes, there are new challenges being presented, but I honestly like that it keeps me on my toes and forces me to continue to get a read on the meta and make different deckbuilding decisions.
As the person who made the Slack chat, I would kind of agree with you here. While I like how it brings together the community, it can also have problems being an echo chamber. I don’t really know if there’s anything I can or should do about it – it is what it is. Personally, I only read it from time to time, and engage in most of my Netrunner conversation with my local meta in our own various chats. If someone doesn’t have a local community and is restricted to playing on Jinteki and only hanging out in the Stimhack Slack, I can see how one might perceive the game as one particular way.