[Levykid]

Dota 1 perhaps, But Dota 2 has been almost perfectly balanced. HoN is by no means balanced and never will be most likely but I would still rather play it than LoL.
That and unlike Riot Icefrog doesn't fix what isn't broken on a regular basis. There are so many cases of them making absolutely idiotic patch changes that I cannot begin to list them.

They don't want things to get stale. It'd be as if unlockables were never introduced to TF2. When all that first came out, you'd better believe people raged. "WHAT?! But the game functions just fine! Why fix what isn't broken?" And now look. Riot's just like that.

But that's always the problem with being a company that makes online games. Some people will be pissed no matter what. It's impossible to please everyone.

the big difference between hon and lol is that in hon every hero is viable, whereas in lol there are some clearly all-around inferior choices

This is how many fighting games are, or any game where you have to balance more than 4 or so things. Some are going to be better. Unless everything is the same, it's going to be tough to make everything have the same viability.

Also, there are definitely character with less competitive viability than others. AOE seems to dominate a lot of the time, so if I play say... Pudge I get to eat one person then the other team can ignore me for the rest of the fight.