Garent

And I lose a little bit more faith in the current powers team.

I think that it would lead to a more balanced and more interesting game if enemies had mez suppression as well, but only in the long term. In the short term, you're looking at the standard problems that come with such a big design change. That is, a lot of players being unhappy because their cheese has been moved, a lot of players being unhappy because they've been nerfed, and a lot of balance changes for mez powers (as you mentioned, area mezzes wouldn't need such a big penalty at that point) and the mez system in general to accommodate this new design paradigm.

For example, how do you make it so that a controller can't be screwed up by an energy melee tank using whirling hands before the controller fires off their area hold? There are some potential solutions to it (such as making a system where mezzes are 'ranked' so that harder mezzes such as hold replace softer ones such as fear) but it would take some time to decide on the method and balance it correctly.

My stance on it is that if we were dealing with a game that hadn't been released yet, I would definitely support a system like this, but since we're dealing with player expectations the amount of boat rocking is greater than the long term benefit in my opinion.

It's about time this happened. We've been trying to get you guys to make IOs more like attuned IOs from the start.
However, depending on how it's implemented, the modified recharge based proc chance would very likely mean that any recharge buffs past a full attack chain would be a penalty instead of something that doesn't affect me at all.
I'd suggest keeping the procs per minute based on the base recharge of the power, tweaking them slightly so it's not so absurdly easy to hit 100% with them (I don't see anything wrong with a 100% hard cap myself), and then enforcing a hard limit to how often they can proc per minute.

Numbers time!

Force bolt has the same recharge rate, endurance cost, and range of a standard tier 1 blast. Compared to power bolt, it has significantly larger knockback that happens 100% of the time instead of 20% of the time, and also has an accuracy bonus of 1.4x. If we did buff force bolt's damage to be in line with power bolt, then it would have only one drawback, but it's a large one when talking about single target damage output, and that's DPA. Force bolt's animation time is by no means large, but it's still bigger than power bolt's. The argument could very easily be made that force bolt would be better than an actual attack power at that point (and I would agree with it) but because it would still have a lower DPA, it wouldn't have a large effect on the damage output of high end defenders, especially considering that we're talking about a set that doesn't have the 30%+ resistance debuffs that other sets do. It would be pretty nice on controllers who desperately need the extra single target damage pre-epics, but again not anywhere near overpowered for them at high level because it has to compete with ancillary pool powers and its total damage output is still lower than the likes of radiation and kinetics as it should be.

TLDR: Force bolt would be above the bar for powers if it was set to damage scale 1, but it is not significant enough to unbalance mid-level play and due to the context of the power and the set that it's in it would not unbalance high level play either.

Scale 1 damage for force bolt was exactly what I've been suggesting too. I'm not too big on debuffing being added to force field, but only for conceptual reasons. My ideal conceptual vision of force fields is defense buffs, knockback/down, and damage.

Now I am extremely conscious of the state my feet are in. Thanks a lot.

The only vigilance buff that I ever thought of that I could get behind was status protection if a member on your team was dead.

AR/Ice was the poster child for bad synergy and poor performance back in the day. AR has been buffed a significant amount since then though.
I'm casting my vote for electric/devices. Nonexistent area burst damage and terrible sustained single target damage. Learning how to properly leverage devices would be key, and even once you did you aren't looking at a very high level of performance.

Sets have to be balanced against each other. This isn't debatable. We can't speak of only the maximum in a discussion that also has to include the minimum, and most importantly the average.

Fun fact: Arachnos soldiers, without specializing and only using the four single target attacks that come in wolf spider, deal greater single target damage on average than a blaster who has not taken or does not possess melee attacks in their secondary.

Archetypes have to be balanced against other archetypes both with IOs and without them. If an archetype is unbalanced without IOs, then the archetype should be changed. If an archetype is unbalanced with IOs when it was previously balanced, then the IOs should be changed.

It potentially could, but you're looking at far too much work just to drain one boss. The immobilize from electric fence will be a much more effective method of defense against those.

To go further in depth, the reason it starts at nothing and scales up is because at low levels everyone has the same or very similar modifiers to their damage and such. Archetypes slowly grow in to their normal damage as they level up. I think the level at which they finally reach normal levels is 20 or 21.

Hard to argue with two tornadoes.

Kinetics encourages you to be in melee range, so cones don't work as well with it. It's not like it gimps you to use a blast set with a cone with it, it's just something that makes combat a bit more of a hassle.

Your ideas of time and storm will both work well with the combo, and arachnid's suggestion of cold is a good one too. Each of them have their own respective drawbacks though. Time is pretty defensive and low on the offense, storm has a good number of tough to use/situational powers, and cold is painful until it gets its later debuffs.