The soak/reduce change made marginal (near-glance) hiltslashes more effective, but well executed ones hit for near full damage anyways. I honestly just think that people got better at hiltslashing. Nothing wrong with that, it adds more mind-games to fights.
If I get caught in a hiltslash, I don't see any more mind-games than having to block twice and then alt+f4'ing due to the growing brain tumor in my head that has occured during the duel and is now killing me in real life.
I think the biggest problem in the community is how split it is, one side wants a sort of simulator (I would be on this side, I'm fine with taking a bit of freedom and stuff but hiltslashes and spinning just looks ridiculous to me and apparently to alot of other people.)
And then the other side which want some sort of Arcade version where archers/crossbows/throwers are twitch-based quake railgunners and where everyone is spinning like a top to score skills.
This game reminds me a bit of GunZ, if anyone ever played that. I played back when it was relatively new, everything was good and dandy, players used the game mechanics as they were meant to be used. Fast forward to about a year, everyone was now glitching animations to do fucked up BUTTERFLY 360 SHOTGUNTOYOURFACE jAHFSJASHF bullshit, I don't exactly want cRPG to turn into this (Even though both Native and cRPG turned like that to a certain degree already, spazfeinting comes to mind.)