I will preface this by saying that even after taking the following points into account, I do believe that the game has a good balance of top tier heroes and high-mid tier heroes. There are few tippity top tier heroes, and none of them are on the scale that they can win games just by picking and playing around them. However, I don't think the fact that there are no "game winning picks" directly points to balance, although it is a strong positive when talking about balance. I want to give a side of an argument on why I believe it's a bit of willful ignorance to quote "105/110 heroes picked" as a sign of balance.

The games got more balance than a lot of other games/patches, but to pretend that there aren't some balance problems because of that is being a bit disingenuous. I think that by there being no ho ho ha ha heroes this patch, it can create an illusion of balance. It leaves us with a mentality of "out of sight, out of mind" regarding the low picked heroes.

Here are some heroes with notably low pick rates and low WR:
Earthshaker, Necro, Clock, Techies, Sniper, Troll, Omni, Wraith King, Jakiro, Pugna: 1 pick, 0 wins
Windrunner & Tusk: 2 picks, 0 wins
Clinkz & Pudge: 3 picks, 0 wins
Brewmaster & Enigma: 3 picks, 1 win
Lycan: 4 picks, 0 wins
Weaver: 6 picks, 1 win
Phoenix: 7 picks, 1 win
LC & Tiny : 7 picks, 2 wins

That's 22 heroes in the bottom of the barrel, and I didn't include any heroes picked more than 7 times in that number. A multitude of more commonly picked heroes have <33% winrate (For example, Earth Spirit was picked 22 times with an 18% winrate, Alch 30 times with a 26% winrate).

If you take out heroes with 30% or less wr, you get to 79/110. 40% or less wr gets you 63/110. Ideally, you want to hover around 50%, and obviously that will never happen, but when 43% of your hero pool has less than 40% winrate at a tournament to showcase the best talent on these heroes, especially when the less picked heroes are picked only when they fit the game's lineup, it should be a bit indicative that there are balance problems.

Again, I'm not saying IceFrog does a bad job, and I think a lot of these heroes are a couple of stat points away from being viable, but for now, they don't have those stat points, so they aren't. I've seen some people use the quote as a write-off in balance discussions, and I want to offer this as a proposition as to why it's not a fair representation of balance.

Closing note: TI5 had as many unpicked heroes. Would you call it just as balanced as this patch?