Team Builder is neat but I havent started a game with it yet... I just dislike normals too much. I tested the rest of it though and it is really cool. I wish there was a way to implement it for ranked but I just cant see how that would work.
On another note, I've really been expanding my champ pool and have been mostly successful. Climbed my way back up to where I'm getting paired with mostly gold players again. For a bit there I was getting paired with Silver II/IIIs. I've remained Gold V the entire time and I am actually close to promotion to move back up to Gold IV.
My new mindset is to basically "always pick a counter, even if it's a champ I've never played before". My last 10 games feature 9 different champions and Im 6-4 in last 10. I even picked Rumble into a Malphite and I've maybe played Rumble once ever. I missed his ult a lot at first then got use to it. Fun lane, won the game, my opponent was losing hard and had his duo jungle camp my lane all game which opened up the rest of my team to push and take everything else.
I have played 41 different champions so far in S4. 11 of them I have a 100% win rate (16-0 total) and 10 of them I have a 0% win rate (0-13 total). Not too shabby overall. I was most surprised with my 4-0 Jax thus far. I haven't played Jax in like 2 years but started picking him into Wukong top-lane and haven't lost yet. The game has been a LOT more fun for me as I feel like Im learning a lot more and each time I re-learn a champ I feel like Im a lot more focused as opposed to picking Yasuo for the 115th time and being on mostly auto-pilot (I still pick Yasuo quite often though).