Honestly, they just need to decide what to do with Atonement. The absolute blandest and simplest solution would just to turn it into Raiden Thrust - consume Divine Might, Atonement replaces Fast Blade. Or just have Atonement replace Riot Blade, since it's the same goddamn animation to begin with (forward over-arm thrust) and retune potency of the combo accordingly. I loved the "Atonement becomes Apex Arrow" concept I saw here earlier.

I would not ordinarily call this team stupid, lazy, or incompetent - not *seriously*, anyway - but the fact that they left in the whole "have to occasionally drop Atonements or hardcast Holy Spirits" thing and then Bulwark will suffer from the problem they *just fixed* in Sheltron makes for some pretty strong evidence for one of those three being accurate.

Wasn't the point to rework the rotation and flow so that it fits modern design better? Yoshida quite literally said something to that effect in the Famitsu interview just before the second PLL - late enough that changes were likely set in stone at that time and the only thing left was QA testing and maybe a little bit of fine-tuning potency (remember that there's a significant lead time on getting patches and the like approved through Sony.) Was Yoshida just genuinely not aware of how slapdash the rework was?

Too bad they'd never allow such questions into a Q&A.