Warband is very similar to smash imho because both over a low barrier to entry, at first they both appear to lack complexity, warband (4 blocks, 4 attacks, 1 kick), smash (5 attack directions). There aren't many options, but it requires some execution on your part to do all the moves as you want. I'd argue smash and warband are very similar, I have a very hard time in smash executing a tilt vs smash or short hop on demand in pressure situations, the same way I had trouble selecting blocks/attacks in warband.
So you can play both at a basic level and have reasonable success There is good depth out of the gate, enough to always just play like this.
But if you want to go farther, both games open up in complexity like a vast maw. Spending half a second on a competitive smash forum can send you screaming for all the stuff you need to understand and execute to play at a higher level.
This is what makes a great multiplayer game great, lures you in with simplicity, keeps you around with plenty of stuff to do.
My favorite thing about warband was how a newbie can slice right through a pro because he didn't respond to some feint combo the pro spent 3 weeks practicing in a mirror. Just swings his dumb newbie sword, over turning the direction input, purely suicidal and totally the wrong time to swing, and bam, takes the pro's head off. And then suddenly the pro asks himself, how can I just do that, on purpose? Then he spends a month dying like an idiot trying to answer that question.
I think that is what some of the more involved players are trying to hint at, that warband aways will throw some sort of knuckleball at you, some other system to master, some other way to look at how everything interacts, an we are only talking about melee here, there are still throwing weapons, horses, and projectiles to think about.
We all want better visuals, better expressions of the underlying systems. As beautiful as some of those feinting patterns are I dislike them immeasurably. They start to remind you that you are playing a game... and I think that's what rubs people wrong.
I think they are there because the combat system didn't offer enough offensive tools to overcome someone who could see and block most every 'regular' feint in the game. You didn't see people doing that early on because a 1/2 feint was all that was needed.
I don't see a way to chop it though with out wrecking the other parts of the game, all the systems in place fight each other. Slow down the block locking in place and you remove responsiveness and the ability to see that someone is set correctly to block you. Ok so then say you reward chambering the attack longer with more stun/damage, and now you give too much time for the defender to pick the correct block.
That one interview said something about gaining weapon speed off weapon momentum or something, and see maybe they already got it figured out, reward actually releasing the attack in some way.
Eh anyway time will tell I guess, fun to argue about it for now at least