1: Jimmy, best wishes at and safe travels to MI this weekend (if it even happens). The weather here in OH is a (pain) and is only going to get worst. I jsut hope it doesn't hit too much farther north.
2: On one of the bannings, I kinda have to agree with you on Gardy. It pretty much makes it impossible for you to play a decent Supporter and feel safe versus any (P)-based build. Free trainer uses without drawbacks are a bit broken in the format right now, and no solid soft counter or true hard counter currently exists that can handle it. I'm unsure fo what will be in the enxt set, but I don't see any sort of counter coming up for a format powerhouse. Like Sneasel and Slowking before it, this card needs to go.
3: On the other bannings (and this may come from me not having played a solid build of this deck yet), but I don't see Magmortar as a huge problem. Sure, the Body is a bit much, but its HP is decently low enough and should still be able to hit the d/c pile quickly enough. Water techs along with differnet counters (ER2 and Bench snipers soft; CC, Lake Boundary, Beach hard) all exist in a high enough quantity to deal with this card. Some emtagame must exist in order for the game to survive and I only see Magmortar as a rather large portion of it. Other decks still exist and I think we'd see them in higher quantity minus Gardys.
4: I still say that the format is less diverse because of power creep, not jsut because of broken cards. Few players will play any major pokemon line from before DP for fear of double weakness. On top of that, pokemon from pre-DP have, on the whole, lower HP, greater retreat cost, and less powerful attacks. Essentially, the older cards are useless unless they are used in utility. What we need to see is some leveling off of the power creep or we'll see this game eventaully fall to the playability of YGO, only those with top cards will make the top cuts.