You just never quit do you GTX
Anyways, I'd say it's fairly well balanced, but for straight-up battles I'd go with either pole or 1h. Pole because they have really good all-round weapons + a lot of different weapon classes (lance, pike) use pole WPF. 1h because they are so fast they go through people's blocks really easily, headhits are important in today's +3 armor-filled servers, and the ability to carry a shield ofc. Also, having a short weapon is awesome for just flailing away in group fights, especially when combined with autoblock (click-blocking with lighter shields is awesome).
I did recently make a 2h char though, and I have to start by saying that the animations fucking rock. Sideswings rarely glance and so are great for both duels and stuff like jump-slashing. Stab reach is a great boon (and YES you can, in fact it's not very hard to make point blank fast stabs, you just can't make ultra-fast long stabs anymore), and the overhead just "feels" better (better reach, but also feels more smooth).
Now the downside to 2h seems to mainly be the fact that the weapons are generally more specialized (not as "all-round" as the poles) and that you have less to choose from.
So for duelling/flanking I'd go with a 2h, but as said they don't seem to be as good in mass melee. Edit: Yeah there is the Great Maul, but I really do regard CT as a seperate weapon class, even though 2h clearly got the advantage in that dept.)
As a final note though I'd just like to point out that there are great players playing every melee class, and on the whole I see no massive imbalance.
Yes, polestun is bullshit but they're getting rid of that anyway.
Poll