Well for the most part, polearms dont bother me too much. what confuses me is that strength build tin cans can out spam me using elegant poleaxe or bec-de-corbin. it really bothers me when i have to struggle to land a hit with my 24 agil 172wpf and less than 10 weight sword and board character. i even experimented running around with only a peasant shirt, felt hat, steel buckler and a khyber knife... and i still could not keep up with the speed of polearms being used by guys with 9-15 agil. i guess the issue is the animations, for some reason the time from clicking attack to the time the blow lands, is shorter on big angry polearms than it is on crazy little knives. i dont expect to be able to counter everyone, but i think its a little rough when i have to hit someone about 5-6 times, whereas they 1 shot me... and they have the speed advantage too... oh and half my blows will bounce which usually leaves me pretty open.
regardless of realism (im sure most people have agreed that balance is more important than realism) i would be interested in seeing how things looked if some of the polearms were unbalanced. I also support Kalams idea of upping strength requirments on a lot of polearms/2handers (though some polearms dont seem to require any agility to be dangerously fast). or perhaps take another look at how armour effects wpf and speed. it seems that the run speed difference in heavy armour is noticeable, but the swing speed difference is very minor.