Few people liked it ever, anyway. Sadly the dev's don't care, I've seen this with a dozen changes. Most of the changes they do are poorly researched cause their play time with the game is minimal and instead of listening to the community, they do what they think is better, which rarely is better. Ofcourse they should not react to the communitys first reaction to a patch, cause we don't like change all that much. Well written, rational posts a bit later should atleast be considered though.
From looking at the current gameplay, it basically nerfed skilled teamplayers and buffed spamming noobs. You see it all the time, an 8 athlethics crossbower jumps into the middle of an enemy group and can run around swinging for 30 seconds, cause no one is able to hit him. Normally in the vicinity of teammates, one would use precise stabs or overheads to minimize the risk of hitting a teammate. Nowadays though 8 athlethics means that they sidestep faster than you can turn, because the turn rate was very, very drastic.
(Another great change, earlier active attacks against friendlies, which few people liked but they refused to revert. Nerfed teamplay as well. Well, atleast that was a nerf to sideswinging noobs. The devs know that if you just don't care for long enough, people will accept the new shitty situation. Same is going to happen to the turn rate nerf ofcourse.)
Sideswinging, the easy noob attacks, got their effectiveness increased a lot, relative to turn rate nerf affected attacks.
Devs also didn't quite formulate accurately what their aims were with the turn rate nerf. I assume it is lolpiking and lolstabbing. As far as 2h stab goes, that is way worse now, cause it can do facehug insta hits as well as very late dragging hits. It's truly omnipotent. Even though you could wiggle it like crazy before, atleast the hit always came at the same moment and chambering was a reliable strategy. As far as lolspearing goes, that is still extremely effective. I haven't lolspeared before the change, but I know it is pretty damn strong now once you work out how to do it.
Another valid tactic that I used as a 1h and as a german poleaxer against cav. Chambering their lances to hit their horses in the ass. That doesn't work anymore. Overhead chambers in general are quite fucked now with short weapons.
TL;DR version, it broke everything that it tried to fix, just in a different way and broke a few things on the side. Simultaneously it took a bunch of skill out of the game by promoting the already easy to use sideswings.
