Blocking I understand, while I think the hatred of the new system is overblown I did like how you were rewarded for your timing much more in the old system, whereas now it's just straight up better to be aggressive and kill enemies faster rather than actually play a mix of both offense and defense.

...but I strongly disagree with not wanting to fix dodging, dodging is both unintuitive and pointless since there was no point to dodging since parry did everything better.

I also think that last paragraph was pulled out of your ass, Saying they nerfed shields to make the game longer makes so much less sense than them nerfing it because there was no point in using anything without a shield as they're just that strong, imagine if they introduced a new 2-handed weapon and no one used it because you can't use a shield with it. There are things that really were put in the game just to prolong it like inability to teleport metals, but this would be such a weird and roundabout way to make the game longer when people are already making the best armor they can regardless. No one can parry every single attack, going to the Swamp and later biomes with just troll leather isn't as common as people think so people actually would already be upgrading their armor.

Using the "they just want to make the game longer" criticism only works when you don't just throw it out at the drop of a hat.