Cracked 1 vs 100 stick fight hacked

I have 2.2k hours in PoE (most in versions below 2.0), and I'm quite unhappy about my capabilities and "success" so far. The reason is that I tend to do things I do not like, and now I'm trying to move my mindset into something I can stick with, accept what I don't want and hope that I can find a Solo SSF league starter I want to stick with, and finally see something of the endgame content. The 2nd thought is to figure out what is different in SSF (and that's a lot if you think about it), and how to tackle it. So far I detected my own mistakes about wrong builds in SSF:

1) the build has to fully work on rare equipment

100% obvious, and still I manage to either use builds where I hit a wall at yellow maps and notice that this unique may be optional, but do the big difference. And I even failed on believing that you cannot rely on finding the threshold jewel necessary for SST. So I need a build that really, really goes with basic mechanics, and scales offense and defense well

2) focus on generic rares

Not-so-obvious, but a painful lesson. If you need Hit, Crit, Attack Speed, Cooldown recovery and whatnot, you will have a bad, bad time finding upgrades once the mapping begins. Without trading, you will miss so many "actually" good items just for the super low probability to have a decent combination of decent affix tiers on a drop.

3) socket colors do matter

With limited (and not tradable) currency, you will run out of Chromatic Orbs if the gem colors do not match the armor you want to use. I've felt this worst for CI builds that use green or red gems a lot, not a good idea at all. On top of that, leveling isn't just a two-hour-job for me, and many off-color requirements make this a lot harder than necessary.

4) natural elemental resistance does matter

Any decent guide or build will tell you that elemental resistance from tree is a waste, and you can easily put them up via equipment. That's not entirely true for SSF, as you can't simply search and trade a piece of equip that matches your resistances. The more comes passively, the more dropped/crafted items you can actually use. Also Alira isn't so bad, even though any "real" build will go for two passives.

5) attribute requirements do matter

Similar to resistances: in SSF, it seems to be suicide to run a build that requires 40, 50 or even more stdex/int from gear. You will end up with those crappy gloves that have +55 dex, never be able to replace them and pass on factually great drops. My dream build would inherently have the required attributes just from build, so we simply can forget about it.

6) Weapon damage

This may be controversial, but it appears to me that spell based builds are absolutely superior in SSF, especially as a league starter. The ratio from "dmg from gem" to "dmg from gear" seems totally out of control, even with the recent changes to attack skills scaling a lot better with their gem level. I simply never had the luck or resources to find or craft a SSF attack based weapon that would give me more than ~35-40% of what is possible, thus any bow/weapon character had a huge disadvantage. When I look at gem scaling, I found that Detonate Dead may be something worth looking at - apparantly this is one of the strongest skills when we consider bad gear (but I'm sure there are many more "good" and "bad" skills from this perspective)

7) Lifebased vs. Energy Shield and CI

Also seemed obvious, but it's way more important than I thought. Of course low-life is neither something for SSF, nor for a league starter - haven't found a single Shav chest in my 2k hours, and on top you need an impossible amulet. High ES equipment also is something you won't ever aquire in SSF, at least compared to what you can do with a live based character. Going CI may be possible, but extremely painful until you could transition. Although CI equip isn't so bad on the long run, as you can skip life and chaos damage, so I wouldn't write off CI entirely from the list. That is important, as certain areas in the tree simply do not support big life pools without ES, and I really like builds around Witch and Shadow.

8) Defenses

Most important topic in PoE, and I'm quite cueless what to think here. Many defenses either rely on mechanics that totally put me off (Flask Piano, Fortify, constantly re-casting something), or on unique items we can't reliably gamble on. So the best defense in SSF may be a high life (or ES) pool with lots of regeneration and/or leech; life seems like the to-go-solution here.

9) Hit, Crit

Both is a real problem without certain uniques or mindblowingly good gear, and 2). This of course again puts Spell skills above attacks, especially with Elemental Overload. SSF is like always being stuck with mediocre gear, where any decent guide or build teaches us something that is twice as well equipped. So you can try to have high hit chances, but then you won't crit hard enough. Going with Elemental Overload or Resolute Technique seems so much favorable for early and midgame progress. Assasin seems to be the only ascendancy allowing good crit builds with realistic SSF gear, but that tends to be a glass cannon as well. That leads us to

10) Damage scaling

It's quite possible to respect all of these until now; but - at least in my experience - then we'll run out of damage way before we see endgame content. Crit requires insane gear (limiting gear improvement options a lot) to really shine; elemental conversion doesn't multiply anymore, Ignite doesn't work at all since it was nerfed to the ground. Impale is a cool mechanic, but the (right) Watcher's Eye seems mandatory to really beat ass. Bleeding (more or less) requires weapons and usually fails on some bosses. Minion damage doesn't scale that well, only poison and chaos dots seem in a good spot for what we can achieve in SSF.

11) Singletarget/Boss damage

While I already have a huge mental list of "what builds will not work", this is another issue. It's nice if we can melt maps on our medium quality gear, but successfully doing bosses (Guardians, Shaper, Elder, whatnot) is another restriction. Some builds really fall apart here, and I'd like to respect this. Bonus points for stuff like Mines and VD, where you can pre-heat the fight and come close to skip stages even without millions of dps.

12) 5-links max

I tend to think that not having the 6th socket is something like losing ~40-50% of the damage. I need to plan both damage and mechanics around that; in no way I will find a 6 link that isn't a Tabula Rasa (which is kind of horrible for survivability). But for certain builds (especially with triggers), we're losing much more or it doesn't even work out. That's another dimension for my designated SSF build - it has to be fine with 5 links.

Bottom line (finally)

If I now add my personal list of "what I dislike" - and that's quite important to keep playing my main char so I can finally "beat the game".. Many-buttons things, keeping up things (I'm old) - like charges, warcries, flasks, fortify, RSR. Melee puts me off, usually because I instantly die when I don't see that my leech sources are gone. Traps and Mines always feel too clunky. Totems and Minions - I've seen enough of them for a 2nd live. And I really need to play SSF and Solo - anything else is a joykiller.
On the other hand, what I really like and enjoy: Triggers, so satisfying. Slow, powerful BAMM attacks that in the best case spread around - I loved ignite proliferation builds. I also love high life/ES with exaggerated regen, and blocking. My current favorite builds are:

• VD/DT spellslinger necro: Feels good. Barrage (instead of cyclone) is a bit meh, but overall I really enjoy it and it's a strong league starter. Bad Attribute requirements, and I'm afraid bad damage scaling and survivability
• Cyclone CoC Bladefall assasin: Simply amazing, and perfect. Sadly this build is low-life (tried standard heist league for it), and I don't really see how this build could be life-based and SSF friendly - then it'd be perfect.
• RF Chieftain: I feel like this still could work well, especially with the new Flame Wall. Great defense and life pool/regen, 11/10 satisfying gameplay
• CI ED/Contagion: Probably the best SSF build by my standards. In a way I'm trying hard to find an alternative that is more fun, but this may be the king in terms of what it can achieve

Also possible, but insecure about it:

• Herald of Agony maxblock duelist: Tried it once, really has some interesting perks and levels like a breeze. However it felt clunky, the pet is never where you want it
• Simple caster Witch/Templar: just cast your Arc/Ball lightning/Fireball/spell of choice. Ironically, I've never ever played such a build, and it looks like the most straightforward thing to try (in SSF)
• CI CWDT/CWS trigger bitch: The one build I will never forget (before trigger supports had cooldowns), but it's probably not working anymore
• Something around bladefall and poison. Going through my list this seems like something that could work (and I've never had a poison build except HoA), although I dislike the dex gravity which usually comes with bad life/regen
• Any other spellslinger triggerhappy build. Maybe with bladefall and poison?

I'd be happy to learn what I got wrong, and maybe a recommendation for something I may like (looking at you, lifebased CoC Bladefall)