If you need to fight enemies in water you are doing it wrong. If you pull troll to your house you are doing it wrong. Trolls are easy. with bow and some arrow they die. They also lack any sense of proper path finding so it's easy to pin them between trees and rocks and just shoot them with bow.
Stamina and food is core feature of the game. You need to make sure you eat the best food available if venturing outside your home. Running in swamp, mountains or plains with boar meat, honey and berries is just stupid and a death wish. Also not having rested is stupid. Always have rested. You can get 8 minutes in open sky with just a campfire.
For me it seems that H&H is actually easier than original release. Wolfs are easy. Goblins are simply so stupid now that even 2 star ones are easy kills.
Blocking is fine. You have to choose between block and parry. If you don't like to parry, use tower shield. If you know how to parry, use any thing other than tower shield. You can parry pretty much everything including stone golems, trolls and fuling berserkers.
Parry gives you opening for 3 crit hit combo.
People like to find problems where there are none. Whining just because whining is so easy.