A drone battle ship with EWAR for the Amarr would have made my decade.
A Khanid battleship with a TD and Torp bonus would have made mine. Or torps and neuts.
But it seems like its all about the glass cannons.
Where suddenly the ping starts to play a bigger and bigger part in EVE.
Hate to break it to you, but if you think the meta shifting towards bigger and bigger fleets has been sudden, you missed the last 4 years of EVE. While it had started before QR, it ramped up in earnest then, and has only been reinforced and encouraged with every major expansion since. And everything CCP has done to advertise EVE Online has been to promote these enormous fleet battles (see also; claims that tens of thousands of players engage in fights together all the time), and next to nothing they've done has helped small gang warfare (these days <20 a side--if you'd have asked me in 2007 or 2008 I'd have said <10 or <15 respectively) at all.
Where EWAR in general turns useless.
This, too, is not a new trend. Damps were nerfed into utter uselessness (outside of situations such as the tourney) after AT4. They've never gotten a second thought, going from one of the most effective forms of ewar in the game to utterly useless even on bonused ships (and the latter part is where the nerf went too far--an ewar specific ship such as a recon
should have absolutely crippling ewar). ECM was ushered out when it was forced inside of scorch/arty ranges in boats that can die in under two volleys to either. The fact that it doesn't stack well against large numbers doesn't help either. I'm not sure if the remote ECM burst was supposted to be some sort of large-scale ewar buff, but if it was it failed. Once you get past a gang size of about 20 ECM is approaching uselessness. By 40 it's flat out pointless, as there's no good way for ECM boats to coordinate their jams like logis can coordinate their reps. There are no watchlists where the ECM boats can tell which targets are already jammed, so overlapping jamming will certainly occur if you field more than 1-2 ECM pilots and you're simply wasting bodies at that point. Damps are similar in nature. TDs as well, for that matter (though in truly small-gang PvP TDs are bar none the best form of ewar unless you wind up against a strict missile composition). And lolwebs now that they're 50-60%. I don't think target painters have ever been good in EVE PvP outside of very very specific tailored situations (mostly tourney, again) or when flying things like torp boats, at least not compared to the opportunity cost of fitting something else.
Active tanks are already thing of the past, making the passive tank the only viable option, the only option.
A bit of a generalization, but mostly true. Certainly operating in any sort of small active tank composition (3 or less, more likely solo) without any sort of scouting is playing russian roulette. But in <5 a side groups they're still viable on boats with active tank bonuses, such as the Sleip, Maelstrom, Hype, etc. Generally need faction/deadspace on the shield tanks and/or boosters/implants or a combination thereof to make them truly shine, however.