My two cents, regarding melee:
1h is fine as it is. The change to the right swing in particular was a good buff; that animation is so much more useful now, where as the old right swing was just an s-key swing. Reverting the 1h buffs will make the class even less appealing in comparison to 2h and polearm. The balance between 1h, polearm and 2h is decent at the moment, no need for more nerfs.
I'm not seeing any of these instant hits you're talking about either. Good players move into their swings and know how to hit as early as possible. Left swing while aiming low is fast to connect, but you can always see the animation starting and have time to put the block up. When I miss a block, It's my own fault (apart from when playing on NA with 200 ping
), not something that can be blamed on game mechanics. This is a skill based game, some people react faster than others, some people take years to reach their skill cap, others reach it in months. Unfortunately a lot of people prefer to blame game mechanics, server lag, or whatever, instead of being patient and spending hundreds of hours becoming familiar with the animations like all the top tier players have.
We should all know by now that there are no new players, so making balance changes because of the steep learning curve for new players doesn't make any sense. It's too hard to get new people interested in a mod for a 6 year old game with terrible graphics. But removing the turn rate nerf (among other things) might get some old players back.
TLDR: Rewarding, skill based combat is why people still play this 6 year old game despite some of its flaws; don't make things easier for all the people complaining on the forums, because they'll start complaining about the next thing that kills them, as we have seen so many times before.