So... about the council....

That's kind of the problem, really. For instance, whether the win actually *happens* in the early game (early crystal rush) or happens in the late game DUE to an early imbalance that takes longer to play out (early rush forcing bad trades or consumable use to prevent a crystal rush), it could still be due to an inherently unbalanced playing field that doesn't have an obvious numerical basis.
 
In all seriousness, Trip, when (if?) you play council, do you not feel forced to play MORE aggressively than with other teams or risk an unavoidable loss? Do games in which you don't get both an archer and a cleric in your first few turns feel like foregone conclusions? Sure, I have often found myself able to scrape out a win against obvious noobs despite bad early council hands and/or team advantages, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule, in my experience.

I assume that the statistics aren't reflecting this? Since I haven't dug into that file or joined the league. In any case, it's also possible that an early advantage might be partially offset by a later disadvantage? Just thinking out loud here.

I have 230 council wins right now, with my queue almost full most of the time. While I wouldn't claim to be the authority on any team (though confident with all but SL, who I haven't yet bought due to concerns with their early balance) I am pretty confident with all of the teams, draw and matchup notwithstanding. I would be happy to learn what I'm doing wrong, apparently, but at the same time I have pretty significant objections to some of the counterarguments you make here:
 
Shaolin are obviously in a terrible place against AOE because the Taoist is just terrible; that's just one of my ongoing complaints about the Shaolin, and that makes them an outlier in this context. Their offense (poisoner in particular) is overtuned in my opinion, but that's an entirely separate issue.
 
The TF2 suffer to AOE because of the wide variety of units required to take advantage of their respective gimmicks. Even so, the medic (with engineer upgrade) does 86% of the cleric's outbound healing while healing himself and having magic resistance to help him survive to be ABLE to heal. He even heals for 81% of the cleric's revive + heal from KO'd! Except in very particular circumstances his healing generally equates to the same number of offensive AP required for the opponent to negate as the cleric. Without even considering his ability to link up to increase another unit's power, the medic is about 85% as good as the cleric at the only thing she does, while healing himself and taking less splash damage from magic sources. This means that instead of having to have a second medic nearby just for incidental AOE (like the council must, or else risk losing clerics to AOE attrition) the TF2 can heal up in less AP and focus on what they do best.
 
The dark elves' healer heals from 50% further away, AKA less exposure to AOE while being able to heal. It's ridiculously easy to form a mesh of priestess healing ranges such that they can revive each other and their front lines without being particularly vulnerable to splash damage. On top of this, dark elf attackers heal themselves. Given the choice between reliance on a squishy healer with good throughput and the ability to keep the pressure up on my opponent WHILE healing? It's a no-brainer.
 
In the offensive arena, the council's reliance on archers is pretty self-evident. Wizards are terrible when compared to grenadiers, gunners, void monks, pretty much any AOE-capable offensive unit except for the similarly mediocre Windblade and the overnerfed witch doc. Knights are widely (and correctly) regarded as being terrible offensive units for obvious reasons. That leaves the archer and ninja as the workhorses of the council, AND you MUST have a cleric or else your units drop like flies.
 
In other words, I just can't see any argument that Clerics are, on balance, better than (or even as good as) other healers except specifically in single-target throughput, and even then only by one effective AP which is usually (and easily) offset by the other healers' perks, or that the council's non-Archer offensive options aren't distinctly subpar. Subpar offense + average defense and staying power = mediocrity, in my opinion and experience.
 
Do you have any particular suggestions on how to deal with the team's reliance on the cleric and the cleric's personal squishiness? My experience has been that a hyper-aggressive attack is the only reliable way to gain any meaningful longterm momentum against an opponent of non-begginer aptitude, and that kind of game isn't fun for me regardless of which side I'm on. If I'm missing something about the council I'd love to hear it, but my only consistent losses against council are to early crystal rushes and/or early unit attacks when my early hand doesn't provide me with the tools to defend or respond... If there's some high-level tactics that keep the Council competitive at high-end play, I just haven't heard of them.

1) I stopped giving knights defensive gear a few months ago. My use of the word "recently" in the thread I know you're referencing was, perhaps, overly broad; mea culpa for the misunderstanding.
 
2) The only reason I was doing that in the first place is because, unlike most other teams, even upgraded units have terrible survivability on the front lines unless they're hiding behind a knight. Dark elf units, although vulnerable to physical damage, can recover by long-range revives and life leech; dwarf have the option of shields + pally aura + pallies being able to survive close to the front lines; Tribe has chain revives + meat to initiate a retaliatory strike. Shaolin heals suck, but they are also the kings of defensive combos; TF2 is an entirely different can of worms for lots of reasons.
 
With respect to wizards and infernos- I use wizards consistently, particularly against Council, Dark Elves, or Shaolin (the teams with the poorest tools against AOE). This doesn't make them a good tool, but they are the ONLY tool the council have to do AOE damage. Between his low range, weak splash, and reliance on the frail cleric, it's better than not attacking at all, but usually a last resort when there are no archers available.
I admit to not using Infernos aggressively for damage, but with the Council lacking any other ranged stomp, I often feel that I can't afford to use the Infernos except as part of a scrolled archer + inferno combo to take out a threatening Void Monk or Grenadier with equipment. And again, the only teams that suffer exceptionally against the Inferno are the Council and Shaolin anyway! Dark Elves can spread out and use fewer, individually more-effective/survivable units, while Paladins and Shamans do splash heals. TF2, again, is a can of worms that I try not to open in these comparative balance discussions, but I will grant that a well-placed Inferno or two can put a big spoke in their wheel. That said, it's usually either use 'em both or there's no point, and then you have no ranged stomp or burst AOE later! It's hard for me to feel good about either option.

First, I mistakenly calculated the revive + heal combo assuming the 650 of an upgraded medic vs 800 (not sure where I got that number from, but it was late yesterday after a long day :p ), so I want to point that out.
 
That said, the 1000 HP of a 2 AP cleric heal is not *that* much better than the 3 AP heal from every other healer (900HP vs 1000). In most circumstances, things that will kill the 900 HP unit will kill the 1000HP unit (how many units have more than 900HP without also having resistances that make the difference between a 3 hit KO from a 300 power unit and the 4 it would take to KO the 1000 anyway?), so I'm going to estimate something like a 1.5 average AP advantage to the cleric due to raw throughput. Significant, but when taken into account the AP that has to be spent getting 50% closer than a priestess must, or healing the first cleric with a second cleric while the paladin heals herself, etc. it's not really that big a deal in the long run, in my opinion.
 
Heavies on the TF2 team are hard to heal, sure. The engineer upgrade (if present) still goes a long way to make up the difference in throughput, and the medic has lots of other fringe benefits as noted before. The TF2 are weird, and have lots of offensive gimmicks to help make up for having only 2 medics.
 
With respect to Dark Elves: A) See my above commentary on DE's reduced reliance on clumped units due to individual resilience and the priestess's long range. B & C) Void monks leech life through AOE, AKA easy to pressure/harass while healing themselves; Impalers do 300 base damage, so they heal themselves decently even without a sword; Necros attack from long range so they can do chip damage and heal themselves somewhat without having to be too close to the enemy, although supplemental healing from a Priestess will probably be necessary to top off. It's not very hard to make up the AP loss from the Priestess's heals by offensive pressure + life leech, but particularly if the unit in question has any equipment at all.

It's entirely possible that I have missed some critical aspect of council play that makes the difference between the mediocrity that has been my experience, and the competitiveness that you assert that they posess. I just have a hard time believing that, due to my experience. I have NEVER been handed a ridiculous rush zerg loss by any other team, nor have I had any other team hit my early units so hard that I *cannot* recover (not counting the rare, ridiculously useless  "3 engineers, 2 beer and a shield" kind of opening hands). Likewise, I have never felt so completely outgunned when playing any other team (haven't bought Shaolin, for the record) in the late game, after having been forced to blow consumables early to stay in the game at all.
 
Whether you would say that this is because the Council are numerically "weaker" or just harder to play effectively (assuming the existance of some playing-field-leveling tactic of which I'm not aware), I think it's a reasonable concern, particularly for the team that introduces new players to the game. I know that if my first several games had been against the dwarves, I would have quit in disgust, and the original incarnation of the Tribe (with the field-leveling meat+rage+witch doc bomb) made the Council look pathetic. The Dark Elves are a more nuanced team, I will grant that, but with significant "quality of life" advantages that make them a lot more playable in practice than their numbers on paper would suggest, which means at the very least that there was a lot of learning that had to happen before I felt comfortable facing them as Council.
 
Essentially, the council lacks the relative gimmicks of the other teams and instead has only marginal throughput gains (and most of those in healing) in their place. Unless I'm missing some huge synergy that is so obvious to everyone else that nobody ever talks about it, I can only come to the conclusion that the council is, unit-for-unit, mildly disadvantaged, but that high archer damage + range gives them some early oomph. I'd really love to hear what, if anything, I'm actually missing here.