This is coming from a fairly average player who recently got pretty hard into Astra after unlocking her. I have about 20-30 games on her which I feel most would say would be enough to understand the fundamentals of a character. I think that the Astra changes were necessary and were incredibly healthy for the game, the nerfs to the size of her util didn't kill her, as well as the cooldown nerfs. But I think what made her incredibly uncomfortable to play was her star changes. 4 (especially on defense) just feels like too little to work with considering that 2-3 of them are just going to be used for executing pushes and halting them with her smokes. Because of this I will go multiple rounds not using any util besides my smokes because I'm the solo controller and I have to re-smoke certain areas. I think that just bringing her back up to 5 stars would feel amazing as you wouldn't have all of your stars used or on cooldown at the start of a round on defense. And if this would seem to be too much in-game, taking away her fake smoke would be a great way of balancing that out.