i think the gameplay became to complicated and the more features were introduced to balance it, the more new problems appeared. i started to get this feeling after chambers, stuns, parrying, ripostes etc... patches. i don't want to say, that all the features introduced were bad, but the overall feeling of intuitive original M&B combat was in the end gone - at least for me.
looking back and seeing all the way the Warband has done in development i think the only big problem we ever had were the spammers. i was not fan of this feature in the begining, but i really think that something like stamina should be implemented against spammers and keep the rest of the game simple instead of all these cool hard to trigger lag dependant features.
i'd keep just
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innertia
client based manual blocking
kick
stun done by 2h weapons by overhead strike only
add
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stamina - it would take only a few secs to regain it to full state (but long enough so that everyone can get close to the spammer and initiate "normal" combat)
i can imagine that stamina would drop down drastically only if you would miss the hit, otherwise it would decrease only a little bit - this would work very well, cause the normal combat wouldn't be affected by stamina almost at all, but the spammers that miss 80 percents of their attacks would go down.
just my 2 cents...
p.s.
the other issues like overpowered or to fast or to long weapons are no real problem imo - it is simple to balance this just when the spaming will be gone by altering a few numbers...