Revisiting the 10 year roadmap

[Shurrikhan]

Which is why this is a perfect example of SE's tendency to "overcorrect" on potentially-legitimate criticisms — outright-obliterating things, rather than first refining them.

Oftentimes, SE sees "A" is a problem, and then decides to Plunge straight from "A" to "Z" in one go.

Rather than something like:

A — Manually press a separate Kaiten key before every Iaijutsu.

M — Each Iaijutsu now automatically consumes up to 20 Kenki per use to increase its damage by up to 50%.

Z — Completely remove Kaiten, bake its potency into Iaijutsu baseline, and push all Kenki management onto Shinten.

...where "M" would accomplish everything that removing Kaiten supposedly did, while also still retaining an extra layer of Kenki reward and management, as well as the possibility of automatically performing the Kaiten animation that people are attached to.

That "M" wouldn't actually "accomplish everything that Kaiten" did, though, for a few reasons:

1. You need time enough for the Kaiten animation to go off (without delaying the Iaijutsu itself), if retaining whatever part of the appeal of Kaiten was its animation.
   
   
2. You're removing the ability to salvage a mismanagement. If one would need a Gyoten to cancel an otherwise-fatal knockback or to return to the eye of a 'donut' AoE in time after having burned Sprint early, now they have to actively avoid using Iaijutsu at all.
   
   
3. To many, part of the of Kaiten appeal was that actual key-slide from Kaiten to Iaijutsu, for much the same reason that many PC players fine with using plugins still nonetheless prefer to use separate buttons for each step of a combo, 'wasted' button-space though such may be.

This "A to Z" habit is a very strange, impatient design style, and probably a manifestation of too few designers having too many tasks under too much pressure... so there's a tendency to not want to keep too many long-term "plates spinning" in terms of wait-and-see observations.

On this general point, though, agreed.