I agree with some of the posts here. Like Kunio said, cRPG was much fun in the beginning since it was all new and everyone was learning, so they did not care about balance or imbalance.
I think that the problem relies on newbies (not necessarily new) complaining too much about a certain class and the devs listening to them, when, actually, those newbies should have just learnt how to deal with that specific class.
When we all began whining about imbalance, I'm sure that the mod was quite balanced (I'm not saying that the current version might not have more balanced aspects), and we all should have just learnt how to adapt and counter those tricky classes (via respec or alts). For instance, regarding the whine about cavalry, people should have just specced polearms and grabbed a long spear, for example. Regarding archers, some 2h could have just switched to shielders. Instead of implementing the "turn rate nerf", people (including myself) should have just learnt how to foresee that kind of attack and block, etc.
All this reminds me of Age of Conan, a game that I played for over a year, and which reached a great state in a specific version and then, after "noob QQ", got constantly unbalanced with every new version, which eventually led to a dead game.
TL;DR - In my opinion, a complete reversion to a previous version or something in between would be the solution.