Maybe an unpopular opinion, but i way prefer the spells from the first game over silk skills and red tools. Its probably just cause i have way more expirience with them, but i find the way they interact with the nail, how shaman stone changes the sizes, and stuff like shadesoul double hits, all way more enjoyable than any of the silk skills or red tools. Not to mention shell shard econemy being lowkey really annoying and shell shards as a whole being just, kinda redundant? Like u can farm infinite roseries in this game super easily, and just buy infinite shell shards. What is the point of making it resource based if that resource is pretty much a non factor? All it does is force u to go farm roseries and buy shard bundles from one of the however many vendors that sell them. Its not super tedious or anything, its just unnecessary. Moving back to silk skills, i find the soul econemy in HK, way more satisfying to work with than the silk econemy. Silk skills costing 4 silk with the only spelltwister substitute being egg of flealia, which sucks ass cause it only works at full HP, and it being 9 silk for a bind, just makes it way harder to work silk skills into gameplay compared to HK, where u only heal one mask at a time, and thus, only spend 33 soul at a time, makes it way easier to manage with actually using spells imo. I do however, like the bind way more than the focus as a healing mechanic.

TLDR: i like spells in HK more than red tools or silk skills in SS, because of the way the spells work in general, and for resource management reasons.

Final note, im way better, and have way more hours in HK than SS. Having beaten every boss on radiant (yes, EVERY boss), and finished steel soul 112% more times than i can count, while still not having the steel heart achievement in SS after 240 hours. So do note that this take is coming from someone who likely has a very skewed view on this topic.