Back when I was going through the same you're going through now, Arena was 10x (at least) more difficult, there were No 1-man defenses and everybody was struggling to reach G4. You had to put real effort just to climb up one tier.
So, forgive me if I'm less than sympathetic.
This isn't even a back in my day story. 10x harder is accurate.
There was a lot of time you couldn't progress out of Bronze 3 without a Speed Aura champ at above 250 speed, an AoE Dec Def champ with solid accuracy, and a solidly built nuker, even picking battles very wisely.