Personally I absolutely love islands. Some of my favourite games of HC4 and WC2v2 were the islands/team islands matches (and no I don't mean the ridiculous Vietnamese vs. Portuguese game in the finals, that was pretty silly). If you think it's boring then you're of course entitled to your opinion, but honestly I legit think it's great.
What is completely fair to say is that the water meta is very one sided at the moment, with Portuguese, Italians, and Vikings far ahead of anyone else. Japanese are probably a very distant 4th place, other civs with water bonuses such as Byz, Koreans, Saracens, Malay etc. just feel lacklustre. I'm not saying every civ has to be equally good on islands any more than every civ has to be good on arena, but I do think some buffs to other nominal water civs would be a good thing.
What is completely fair to say is that the water meta is very one sided at the moment, with Portuguese, Italians, and Vikings far ahead of anyone else. Japanese are probably a very distant 4th place, other civs with water bonuses such as Byz, Koreans, Saracens, Malay etc. just feel lacklustre. I'm not saying every civ has to be equally good on islands any more than every civ has to be good on arena, but I do think some buffs to other nominal water civs would be a good thing.