The etymology of "football" has nothing to do with using your foot to kick a ball. It's descended from games that were played by working people "on foot" as opposed to games that were played by nobles on horseback. There are about seven versions of games called football and only one of them predominantly uses the foot to deliver the ball. There's not a whole lot of kicking in Rugby football or American football.
A commonly-held myth about the origin of a word is a strange criterion to be using for designing the rules of a sport. If we were all speaking Irish and referring to the game as "Peile" I doubt if we'd be having this discussion.
In any case I don't see what people have against the handpass. As long as there's a crisp striking action it looks just fine and keeps the game moving. Why do people compare it to Basketball or Handball as if that's a pejorative? Are those sports inferior? Are they boring to watch?
Because Gaelic Football was founded on the transferring of the ball with the foot.
Handball was founded on the transfer of the ball by hand.
The hand-pass in it's current guise has allowed dreadful county teams and equally poor club sides to somehow call themselves football teams by getting a fitness level , a system , a tackle count and good hand-passing skills. Thus ignoring the fact that neither there club nor their county coaches were ever able to teach their players the basic skill of kicking the ball accurately
I don't want to watch teams like Carlow for example playing Gaelic Football and masquerading themselves as a semi good team playing one forward up front even against teams of their own level like Laois.
How is that what the game was ever meant to be? 75% hand-passing at inter county level was never what the game was envisaged to be .And at club level watching the sort of "Gaelic Football" the Derry championship produced this year wouldn't pass as entertainment even to the parents of the club sides involved.
The game is in crisis. Not every team wants to play like Crossmaglen or Dublin.
But the rules should favour the sides that want to score
Not the other way around.