What I have always hated most about VAR is that so much time is spent with the assistant referees looking at a replay rather than the actual referee on the grass. All those assistants should be doing is making a very quick decision on whether the referee should look at the image. The referee should be the one taking 5 minutes to review a decision, not his fucking underlings.
There should be a 30 second time limit for the VAR to either send the ref to the monitor or not. It is absolutely batshit that these assistant referees are taking so many big decisions away from the match referee who is the person running the game with an actual whistle.
Re: the Mike Dean stuff, it has been obvious from day one that this shit was going on. If you are mates with a diabolical referee like Lee Mason, are you going to force him to go to the monitor 10 times a game because he keeps getting decisions wrong? The scrutiny of VAR would (and eventually did) end his career. They all go easy on each other because they know that next week it will be them on the grass while their mate is in the VAR room.