yes, anything that takes away from the efficiency of the combo is not the direction you wanna go. thats my advice. if you find your combo too slow and youre dying to creatures, then you need to be faster, or maybe force them to interact with you more.
im not too familiar with historic tho so i cant really comment much on the meta. i know thats been a complaint with standard for a while now, lack of diversity in the meta. decks always get finely tuned to be the best aggro or control decks. it happens in all formats, even older formats you see a lot of the same decks.