I usually die in 2-4 decent melee hits with 64 armour and 63 HP. Its down to the player to make the hits do decent damage, if you take 8 hits to kill someone you're probably doing something wrong.
Hold attacks, aim for the head, get speed bonus, hit in the sweetspot etc.
The reason the game is all about the ganks isn't how many hits it takes to kill someone, its that you have to time 2 hits together or swarm people so they can't block everything reliably. If we had more risk with the blocking system we would have less ganking and fairer team fights