Not only we had so many more animation that weren't just "edgy" but more in line with the idea of a Dark Knight (remembering characters like Guts or Artorias for example)

These abilities had different effects than didn't just consist of either "do direct damage" or "mitigate damage by a certain %"
A dot, a blinding effect, a parry, an ability proc on parry, an ability that could empower some others, they could be offensive or defensive, and i may be forgetting some
But to summarize it was more on the idea of gameplay and effects rather than just "hit hard and harder"
Of course some (maybe even many) of these abilities were clunky but they were a part of what made a "Class identity"

The "issue" at the time was that, like many other classes, some abilities weren't useful in Raids and harder content (because for some reason, every ability in existence must be optimized to the maximum even at the expense of the class identity, sometimes even the lore itself)
Which creates cases like Dark Knight where the only good thing you can hear about it are "TBN", "Dump all your spells every two minute" or "cool aesthetics"
Still recall at the beginning of Endwalker, whenever the question of the dark knight class identity was brought (don't recall if it was ingame, on reddit, discord, or maybe even here), it deviated a lot to the idea of "2 min burst feels nice" or "highest damage tank so it's fine"
Not that it's bad in any way to like this class for those reason, just that it's sad to see what we had to sacrifice so much to come to this point

(like i know "sacrifice" is the motto of this class but there is a point where one should stay "stop!" ......)