Sum Gi, your perspectives are valid.
Karasuahega is a rapier you can ascend into electric which makes it combo excellently with the lightning rod. You won't see much difference between the rapier-type weapons overall effectiveness, bar the one you can craft from the spider boss that's more like an odd shotgun. Really, this weapon class is very blessed overall.
Enemies moving around is a factor to plan for. This game has odd difficulty in that respect, because Six-Arms from the town entrance is vastly more mobile than a lot of enemies later on, up until you get the Black Wings crow demon. Then there's the white-robed Senior Inquisitor. So my take on movement is it would be way more relevant if relevantly fast enemies were more frequent and essential to deal with.
Regenerating magic without potions is easy even without mods so long as you have a weapon that recovers magic on perfect block and the enemy attacks frequently enough. In this respect a modded run with more aggressive enemies makes this much easier to maintain than base game because every incoming attack blocked is free magic. That's also why the Succubus is a very trivial fight with this approach -- spam Sword of Praise with massive MP gains every time she does a projectile swarm or her triple-melee blitz.
Yeah, a decent weapon build should do at least 2.5k damage per 10 seconds. Rapiers, katanas, that weird bendy axe from the dungeon and such do that stuff well. It's really what to expect, although a gimmick build around the staff and Sword of Praise where your intelligence is as high as you make it has insane near 5k DPS in 10 seconds. It's funny but not practical. But my tests on this gimmick build showed it was way better than expected. But yeah, if you have freely available dodge then normal melee with fast weapons trumps much anything else.
Your take on weapons is valid, I use rapiers like that too and the dual sword is really unproductive though its gimmick on parry makes it more effective parrying than rapiers against both single and multiple enemies. It's just a weird behavior I found that's nifty. As for multiple hits, good that you caught the katana has a propensity to do that because I mostly neglected it for being rather boring. The fat guarding sword you get from a statue in town has a very high chance of double-hits, and the Zweihander does it so often that may as well be an intended feature. Another gimmick I noticed is the darkness staff that's mostly bad is unusually good in the Ranch, because you fight mostly normal human enemies there and if you're not close enough to hit twice per attack you'll often reflect or nullify projectiles thrown at you... which is super useful in an area uniquely made of projectile enemies and tight corridors.
Your points are all logical, I felt the exact same way on my modded playthroughs. I wish the game was bigger / had a DLC or sequel since the variety is awesome to play with but poorly utilized. It's the kind of game where you do not need any weapon besides your first yet there's so much to see and learn across a wide kit of options.
{{{ Krongorka's post is too long to quote , but see above. }}}
Krongorka, this is awesome! That really is how the weapons should have worked originally.
Relevant to a lot of what I said to Sum Gi and related to Krongorka's post as well, heavy weapons working well and as intended is always welcome. I remember playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (the Castlevania-esque game that gamers rightfully speculated may have
stolen appropriated the heroine's design from Night of Revenge into their heroine's design), and weapons in that game have a cheap gimmick where landing from a jump cancels all endlag... so the meta is big heavy weapons and jumping a lot. Feels jank and small weapons don't benefit from the exploit at all so most things that aren't greatswords or whips suck.