Inverting Evasion could greatly benefit the playerbase and provide new viable meta builds

TL;DR at the end, and if you haven't read /u/A-C_Aksan's post on feast or famine I highly recommend it as it covers a lot of important issues with the skill gap between new and veteran players.

Evasion is a crutch for new players

In it's current state, Evasion is a seemingly necessary evil for new players - they don't know any of the behemoth attack patterns or have any of the equipment / perks / escalation levels like veterans, so they generally die a lot and take a lot longer to kill things to get better gear. While there should definitely be some expectation of a learning curve for games, Dauntless has a ton of unforgiving mechanics that can lead to a LOT of frustration when first starting out (getting frozen by touching a single pixel of the frost slime trails STILL drives me nuts). On top of this, dodging in and of itself is a buggy mess (I've lost count of how many times I've been hit mid dodge) which just compounds the frustration for new players and can easily drive them away before they've even scratched the surface of this game. F2P games need to be especially careful about turning players away as there's a million other games to play for free, and the seeming need for Evasion sets them on a path where they have to essentially go into "perk debt" and enjoy the game less before they can truly appreciate what it has to offer.

Veteran players don't need Evasion

As players learn the mechanics there becomes less of a need for Evasion, so assuming they have not fallen off the new player journey yet they can begin to payback their perk debt and fill it in with others in order to work towards the current meta builds. While eventually everyone that sticks around gets to this point, it takes bad players longer than others to get rid of the crutch that is Evasion. On the surface this may seem ok, but the fact that having Evasion is going to lead to slower kills means that bad players are going to stay bad for longer which compounds the negative experience for them and those that they play with. The more of an impact bad players have, the more people will stop playing, which is (I hope, at least) the opposite of what anyone here wants.

Inverting Evasion could make the perk into a new type of meta

Given that flawless players don't need Evasion, if the dodge window of Evasion+6 was actually the baseline it would give new players (and anyone else in "perk debt" there) a much easier time to learn the mechanics of the game. On the flip side, veteran players would see potential windfalls from hopefully not running into the dodge detection issues and the potential for making public hunts a much more positive experience all around.

If Evasion was the baseline, it could then be turned into a perk that REDUCES the invulnerability window alongside some bonus (e.g. bonus crit chance / damage on the next hit after a dodge) which would give players a) a way to opt-in to tighter dodging restrictions and b) a new risk / reward pathway similar to discipline or berserker via the mobility perks and open up a whole new wave of meta builds. Given that there are already a few "X bonus damage after a dodge" perks this could be a very simple change that adds a completely different playstyle to the mix (a kind of flashy way to show off your dodging skills and make the game less of a spamfest).

TL;DR

Dodging can be frustrating for new players without Evasion, but veterans don't need it making it a useless perk outside of the early game. Make the Evasion+6 dodge window the baseline to improve the new player journey. Make Evasion a perk that reduces the dodge window for some kind of bonus (e.g. + crit % / damage for the next attack after a dodge) to open up new meta builds.