I had a different experience with exploring in dark souls, but I understand your overall point.
Do you have some ability to poll your backers? I am sure if you would do a survey on what type of skills and stances they use, you would get the result that many of them arent being used because they are redundant or straight up bad. I think skills like center, head/wrist/foot shot, berserk, haymaker, magic except heal, seduce, stonewall, feint, the archery system are only being used by a few players, if any. I am very confident the data would support my theory. Now, how you hadle that info, is up to you.
-Rebalance the skills to give them all a meaningful niche
-Add tons of cool interactions with girls to each skill, making using them fun and sexy despite not being meta
-Remove the unused and (mostly, stop splitting hairs ^^) redundant skills and focus on cool interaction and balancing for the remainder
I respect the ambition, and sincerely hope that I am wrong and it comes all together at the end and works no matter what you pick. But I think it is very true that there are many ambitious half baked ideas in the game that will take many years to be completed if not adjusted, that is if they get completed at all.
I usually put skill points into Armor Crusher and Tempo Attack and go AC until armor is gone, then Tempo attack, guard when balance is low. If your fast attack bleeds an enemy, you can grapple her until she bleeds out.
Another strat is going high strength/agi and skilling blitz stance->assault to just deal consistent massive damage.
You can also add Overrun and use it when the enemy is at low balance, then use crushing blow while he is down for massive extra damage.
I think you are being very harsh. I don't like the direction the devs are going with the combat, but it has some cool ideas and is very unique.
I think the grapple system and unique skill interactions (maybe include mid-combat scenes?) have great potential to finally combine the combat aspect with the erotic aspects of the game. But I agree that removing many of the redundant skills and focusing on the ones that matter would be the smartest course of action.