I'm...really getting annoyed at the whole scry ward crap becoming a hard counter that is literally everywhere.
Hard counters don't really exist in reality--it's more like varying degrees of soft counters.
The whole scry ward stuff should be analogous to electronic warfare--slapping a cheap bit of security onto a system is barely going to slow down a proper cyber attack from military-grade gear/software/specialists. Someone is jamming a frequency? If your transmitter is powerful enough (and your receiver sophisticated enough), it gives no fucks. Sure, there's keeping electronic records off of the internet (or any real network), but that's analogous to someone hiding something in a pocket dimension (it's inaccessible because it's totally disconnected from the wider world and connections between them is impossible).
OL is using one of the most advanced pieces of tech in the universe, including when it comes to scrying. That it can be completely and utterly shut down by anyone slapping an ad hoc, makeshift, dirt-cheap, rushjob of a ward onto anything is just dumb.
Lampshading it doesn't make it better, it makes it worse by pointing out how artificial and nonsensical it is. Games that just make bosses immune to a variety of key elements of the player's arsenal (when done purely for balancing reasons) do so because they balanced things poorly and had to take the easy (or lazy) way out. Because such games are never as complicated, dynamic, or versatile as real life. An instant-kill ability shouldn't be in the game if you can only use it on enemies that are too weak for it to be particularly useful.
In this situation, for instance, there are a number of different ways it could have been handled to make the whole scry ward stuff dynamic and interesting: OL can get through the scry wards, but cannot do so without alerting whoever is inside, for example. Or that the wards are good enough that it will take him some time to break through them/circumvent them.
One of the things I like most about this story is that it shows just what a sufficiently intelligent, creative, and motivated Lantern can do (and why one with such huge, versatile power should not necessarily do X or Y). This scry ward business, and how it's being handled, is really encroaching on that, and it worries me.
