I don't recognize Hellspark Elemental and Magma Jet even being on the same plane as Delver and Brainstorm. The mana base is already practically immune to wasteland, I run 2 volcanics at the moment, you rarely ever need to actually fetch them.

- The deck is far from top tier and likely isn't trying to be. Few decks are. I would say that more people would play this deck because it's fairly cheap to build and a completely legitimate contender to win a tournament with, and it's fun to play.

- Delver and Brainstorm fix most of what's wrong with mono red burn. You choose cards based on potential, and Delver has way too much of it to ignore. I've had some games, for sure, where delver just dies immediately--whatever. But the number of games that I've dropped a delver and it's gotten in 6-9 damage for 1 blue mana is enough to warrant him. Brainstorm has shown me Bolt Bolt Fireblast enough times to say "This card fixes burn". You said it yourself earlier, burn's biggest issue is refueling if the opponent isn't dead. Brainstorm refuels you for 1 blue mana at instant speed.

- My opinions of force of will are far from black and white. I tested it in the deck for quite awhile, the consensus that I received after months of testing with it, is that it's not a good fit for the deck. Zilla said it best, the deck needs all the cards it can get.

- Snapcaster Mage is absurdly slow and is painful to see in your opening hand--I regularly just pitched them to force.

- I've already thoroughly outlined why I don't like a lot of counters in the deck. You either end up trying to be Canadian Thresh but you can't because you fundamentally just don't have enough counters to do it, or you end up being a shitty burn deck because your brainstorms find you counterspells when you want burns. Too many brainstorms in a list with forces and spell pierces or whatever resulted in seeing those when I needed more burn, so they were dropped for more burn and everything feels right again.

- I would posit that the lists you see that did well did well when this deck was very early in it's development--as few people have actually performed reasonably with it since, and if they are still performing well with it, I'd probably chalk it up more to drawing the nuts enough times. Lists that run a plethora of counterspells can be fucking nuts if they draw a perfect blend of counters, burn, and creatures.

- I'm not really trying to argue that this is a different deck than burn, in fact if you look at my post history, you'd notice I spent a rather long time in the burn thread recently trying (unsuccessfully) to convince them that this deck is a strictly better burn. UR Delver is a terrible name, I'd much rather call it Blue Burn or UR Burn. Hanni's blue sligh has tremendous support behind it right now from sligh players, not many people have brought it to a tournament however, I think people who play "professionally" are too afraid of letting go of their combo/3 color control decks to try something that fast and potentially swingy, but the testing suggests the deck is absurdly consistent.

However with the printing of Vexing Devil, all this deck actually needs a creature to do is about 4 damage, Vexing Devil fulfills the role Steppe Lynx did in Hanni's list and I'm convinced it's perfectly acceptable to remove it. Steppe Lynx dies to all the same shit Devil does except far worse (at least if you swords a devil you get 4 life back, as opposed to swording it in response to the second landfall trigger and only getting 2 life).

If a guide or delver gets 4-6 damage in, an opponent is at 16-14 life, most players will drop a fetchland in this time, so realistically 15-13 life. The rest is just finding some combination of 4-5 burn spells to kill them, which, isn't hard when you run 20+ of them and brainstorm..

Snapcaster was dropped, for me at least, because it's redundancy that's unnecessary. What does snapcaster regularly do? Hit bolts or something. So it's a 3 mana lightning bolt instead of just another bolt effect.. Force was dropped because after dropping snapcaster and realizing I pretty much only ever pitch snap/daze/force to force it seemed silly to even run it when I could just have more burn. It's good in the combo matches for sure though..

So that really only left delver, brainstorm, and ponder. Which is a perfectly adequate splash that addresses issues burn has.