I have to agree, after all the nerfs, nerfs and more nerfs it looks like the game is catered to old men with the reaction time of a sloth. Speeding it up slightly would make it more entertaining.
At the moment, melee is so slow that it is trivially easy to block a single player indefinitely, no matter what weapon they are using (this was an issue before the right-swing nerf too). This pretty much turns melee fights into a test to see who gets bored first.
I would have hoped that the developers would have been focused on making player skill more important, rather than less.
Just remember how they slaughtered my boy.
cRPG, in early 2011, used to be exciting and fast-paced. Then, with every subsequent patch, there was a drive to make it slower and slower. These posts are from 2011 and 2012 from two top tier NA and EU players, and things got worse after. They started with a fast, skill-based combat system in vanilla, and gradually slowed it down and introduced other mechanics that reduced the skill ceiling. This angers me greatly, friends, and indeed it's the reason why I quit cRPG. Something was very wrong when I could literally bore the best players in EU to death by blocking everything, and it wasn't even particularly difficult.
Offense is very hard to balance with defense in a directional, held block game, and who among you has faith that the Donkey team can pull it off, given their credentials? Well, who?
Also very skeptical about Bannerlord being able to pull off combat that looks good and plays well with a high skill ceiling for the same reason.