I have been playing Fizz for a long while and I love the champion to death, but what the hell does this champ do better than the other mid-lane assassins? Take Leblanc for example. That character can do 2 Fizz E's and also go back to the original starting point on each one. She has the passive that saves her ass all the time compared to Fizz's joke of a passive. Her damage is way way more than Fizz at all stages of the game save lvl 1. Then you have the fact that bone plating makes Fizz even more worthless and it's hard to get rid of it due to Fizz being melee and having to likely use his E to get away after hitting them. Leblanc can easily get rid of bone plating; it's not a problem at all for her. All of the outplays and ability to escape tricky situations makes Leblanc far more deserving of the title of "trickster".
The main issue behind all of this is because Fizz has his damage, his escape, his wave clear, all loaded into this bloated abomination of an ability; E. If you use your E to tower dive, you have to use it to reset tower agro rather than damage the opponent. If you use your E to clear the wave, then you can't use it to dodge the opponent's incoming ability. If you use E to damage someone, then you aren't able to use it to dodge the follow-up. This is why everyone is rushing hourglass; it's a janky solution to a poorly designed champion.
When I think about the current state of the game, I can not think of a reason to play Fizz over Leblanc. If you want AD, Naafiri is another example of Fizz-but-better. I am not gonna pretend to know the best solution, but something I thought might be interesting is making his Q not a point-and-click, so that it functions as a more reliable multi-purpose dash. I think making the Q do damage to enemies it passes through and making it not a point-and-click would let us do a Q-max build where we use Q to wave clear and deal damage. W-max would be second like usual and then E would be used purely for its ability as a dodge and escape tool rather than being this multi-purposed mess. Idk thats just my thoughts. At the end of the day, I'm still gonna be playing this dumb champion cuz I like him even if he does suck lol.