I read through the thread and had spars in game.
I had a fight with someone who had 1500-2000 fewer stats than me and the fight went on forever.
Fyrdman sword worked better and does more damage over time than Hirdsman sword.
When it comes to individual moves I can only speak about MC ones.
I don't see a reason to use cleave/sting/sideswipe/full circle since they all have local cooldowns and for them to be any good I would need to stack my deck full of them leaving little room for anything else.
In duels I use shield up and do a chop until qb gains me ip. Then I let qb gain me about 32 ip and start spamming storm of swords. This is a very long process.
Can't really do big hits with sword and MC. Even a weaker opponent can keep openings low enough so cleave wont really do anything special.
Here is deck I used:

Result was the same with fighting 2 weak opponents.
Interested to see a group combat video/report.
For pve I use pretty much same strategy. For animals with low hp can just use chop spam and sit back.
For moose and stronger can spam chop but using chop+qb*4+storm of swords+chop usually saves more armor hit points.
When I saw the armor change it made me put my top armors back into the closet. I generally like this change since it gives more value to the materials they are made out of. I can already imagine a world with no metals left and everyone runs around in mammoth guard, bone greaves and horse nomad's helm.
I don't know where to go with this system. I don't think tweaking numbers will do that much. If that was the problem with this combat system you could probably balance the 3 previous combat systems too by tweaking numbers.
I expected new combat to have skillshots so a skilled player can outdo someone with higher stats. Maybe if that was true the openings increase, decrease and damage could be more wild than it is now. Another critique I always had in my mind was that there was not enough variety in options for combat moves, weapons and armor. I guess that could be added into any combat system being used.
Thats my experience so far with new combat.