I will leave this thread with a video of Joe Louis. He was "slow" as far as boxers go...but god damn did that guy know how to fight. Skill trumps twitch any day of the week.
This is a really poor example man. If anything, boxing is the antithesis of what you're tying to prove. All of the greatest boxers in history have pretty much had amazing reflexes to compliment their outstanding technical ability.
Whether you want to talk Ali, Roy Jones,Frazier, either of the sugar rays,willy pep,pernell,mayweather, the list goes on man. All of those guys were pretty good "twitchers" if you know what I mean.
Juan Manuel Marquez is an extremely technical fighter who has beaten plenty of younger, faster,stronger fighters in the past, yet he lost horribly to floyd mayweather, an equally technical fighter due to his combination of incredible technique and blinding speed.
In fact, id dare say that it proves the point of what kaoklai argued in response to your posts. Still, the boxing analogy in general is just a bad example when it comes to showing that technique flat out trumps reflexes and im starting to quibble, so ill just move on.
The spoilered part is more of a tangent than anything. Read at your own risk, as I don't want to to take away from the bigger point of my post.Furthermore, i don't agree with your reasoning really. Slowing a game down to the point where inevitable block duels happen between only but the most skilled players might seem fun to a few, but it's mind numbing to most of us, especially with the way alot of features are either being removed or tweaked constantly (turn speeds, sweet spots on weapon stab animations, etc.). Sure, Saul is going to continue being Saul and the same for all of the other elite players but(here comes the tangent). Now it's really late/early and maybe i'm getting the wrong idea here, but it really does seem as if you're advocating making the game's melee combat system more simplistic and more like a mathematical formula of sorts if many aspects can't be cleaned up or implemented and balanced properly. I mean, you hit on a few, but there are quite a few other "exploitable mechanics", as you put it in the game already. One could argue that polestun,insta stabbing,hiltslashing,double swinging and different weapon animations in general are silly/exploitable mechanics, but I for one like that they are in the game as it makes the game more interesting and at times unpredictable.
What i'm trying to say is that the spontaneity that this game's combat provides makes it so that it can't be 100 percent accounted for or written in stone all of the time. As much as I hate being one of those "realism guys" ill bet in battles in the past there were probably more than a few really great/skilled warriors that ended up tripping over a rock or losing their footing that ultimately ended up in them getting killed. Is it a shitty and anticlimactic way to go out? Sure, but that's life man. Nothing is funnier than seeing a guy nearly clutch a round, only to get his swing stuck on an object and get killed over it. At the time, it might be rage inducing to literally get killed over some random variable that you couldn't have possibly seen coming, but more often than not i'm able to look back on it and laugh at how spontaneous and random it was and how unlikely it is to be replicated again. Try blackbarring rhaelys in a duel while you're at full health and then literally getting consecutively pole stunned to death in 4 hits to end up losing the duel. Did it piss me off at the time? Yeah, but we were both looking back on it and laughing about it shortly after and he couldn't replicate it if he tried. I don't want to see this game turned into an ultra slow chess match style melee combat system. I like that alot of these random variables can give even the least skilled of players a chance to have their moments here and there.
Really reflexes and sensitivity are but a few individual parts in the equation. Skill is still the main defining factor here; the others or more so complimentary than others. I mean, Saul uses an inverse set up and it presents alot of issues for me that standard setup duelers cant replicate, but that alone doesn't make him an intrinsically better player. He is the whole package, man. His reflexes,timing and over all skill in general are what make him great. I can't think of a player i've dueled/lost to yet where I thought to myself "man, if this kid wasn't such a twitcher with an ultra sensitive gaming XL elite gaming mouse id totally have his number!". This game really brings it all together to make for a gameplay experience that few other games have been able to replicate.
Your assessment of the community is also a bit off as far as im concerned. It's not so much the community's inability or unwillingness to adapt to changes as much as it is alot of us thinking "if it's not broken, why fix it/change it?" Look how many people stuck around and adapted after the huge change from old crpg?