Yes, I hate it when some feugeot aims down to abuse the animations and instahits without glancing.
Why not just forget about new players and make the mod better for whoever still remains? Complete noobs are rare in Warband anyway, most have at least some experience considering the game's been out for nearly 7 years and is dying. If you want more players, then the best bet would be getting back old players who stopped playing. Ask around and try to get a list of reasons why they abandoned the mod, then try to fix/update cRPG according to those reasons. And who knows, if mod becomes great again, maybe the legendary new players will also join in.
i hope you realize that the reason for this game's longevity is the fact that the skill ceiling is insanely high. just like all of the major games that are being played on a professional level, crpg has a working system that rewards player by getting better at the game over time. raising your own skill level is rewarding in and of itself and thats why people keep on playing it after all of these years (we sure as hell aren't playing it for the graphics). donkey crew somewhat understands this concept considering that when they were demonstrating their combat video for M:BG (before okam), the devs expressly went on about how "after playing for a month and getting better, you finally may go back up to that one guy who beat you and in turn kill him."
to address your whining about animations: work on your footwork and blocking if you're getting destroyed by people aiming at the ground; you need to be able to control the pace of the fight with your own movements, and in order to hit someone while practically looking straight down, you have to be facehugging. you can get good at kicking and counter them, and you can also learn to read movements and stop their attacks with dank rmb use.
btw if you're going to say that 2h animations are more broken than 1h animations, well: ghost reach is on half of the weapons for 1h and it 1h stab can hit really hard; it's also faster than 2h, and 2h stab animations have been replaced b/c original m&b animations are broken af. Secondly, you can just as easily hiltslash with a 1h. want me to tell you the secret? aim at the ground and swing left, and while facehugging, you can slash people in the face with your attacks (ez spam and ez dmg).
additionally if you're wondering why people have stopped playing, i think the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility comes into play here. essentially, the more and more people play this game, the less satisfaction they receive from it. after a while (maybe 5 years of it), people will eventually stop enjoying the game, leading to its death.
there used to be a guy named mokuchin who quit crpg im fairly certain because after he spent like 5 mil on a level 37 respec, the devs upped the retirement level to 35 and gave everyone a free weekly respec