To elaborate on the point that I was trying to make earlier in the thread:
The average skill level in cRPG rose to the point where kicking became fairly common.
As a result, people started complaining because they were getting kicked when they hadn't been previously.
So, kicks were nerfed and people stopped using them for a while.
Eventually the community adapted to the nerf and started using kicks again.
Naturally, the complaints also started coming in alongside.
Even if the AoE effect is removed, the community will adapt and continue kicking you in the nuts at every opportunity.
It seems like most of the anti-kicking crowd are 1-handers who just want kicks to be removed, or to be nerfed so hard that they're totally unusable.
I can understand being frustrated if you carefully time a dodge and avoid your opponent's kick only to move in and get hit by an afterimage, but that's really just anecdotal and doesn't necessarily speak to the core issue. For example - maybe the problem is with strength builds being too tanky. Someone with 70 armor and 10 iron flesh could just spam and try to get lucky chamber-blocks because he knows that even if they miss he can always just block with his face instead. So do you call that a problem with chamber blocking, or with armor, or with iron flesh/str hp passive?
So, I guess my point is that this isn't as simple as saying "KICKS OP NERF PLS."