The treatment of male vs. female characters is, frankly, insulting.

After playing the Mydei demo in the main story quest (<- very mild spoiler), I'm feeling pretty angry right now. The auto-battling part of his kit needs to go; it makes him feel like an NPC. That's what Hoyoverse wants us to spend our Stellar Jades and/or real money on? An NPC? When beta testers reportedly complained nonstop about it?

Male characters, particularly male 5* characters, are always, always underpowered or have some kind of stupid drawback in their kit. Female characters rarely if ever have these restrictions, and it feels like a big middle finger to the portion of the player base who prioritize male characters--mainly women/queer people. I understand that husbando-collectors are probably not the majority of players, but we're already tolerating the relative lack of male characters; why should we also have to tolerate the deliberate kneecapping of their kits?

I was planning to pull for Mydei and his light cone--I even prefarmed for him--but I think I'm going to skip him if they don't remove the auto-battling. It's not just about the kit itself. It's that they're clearly communicating that they don't value me or players like me nearly as much as they value the incels who complain when a male character is good because it, I don't know, threatens their fragile ego, or something.

I know that the favoritism towards female characters isn't exactly news. But it's not just favoritism, it's straightforwardly an insult to the people (again, predominantly female and/or queer) who mainly pull for male characters. They're telling us that we're going to get less, and we're going to like it. If Phainon is disappointing, too, I'm quitting the game.

I have to stop typing now, because anything else I'd like to say about the people at Hoyoverse making these decisions would likely violate community guidelines.

P.S. You can submit feedback about Mydei's kit by clicking on the "Bug Report" tab on the in-game ESC menu and then clicking "Feedback." Even if you were never planning to pull for him, it would be nice if you submitted a complaint about the auto-battle "feature" if you didn't like it, because it's frankly a terrible precedent for them to set anyway.

EDIT: Okay, I was being hyperbolic saying that male characters are always underpowered, etc. But if you are trying to refute my point by bringing up the roughly 3-4 meta-defining male characters that you can count on one hand, then I fear you have missed the point.