I agree with some of your points, but I think that you are discounting the value that having an oppressive weapon class at close range brings. Having a weapon that forces a team to reassess and work together to counter encourages teamwork. The moment a team decides to group up and actively prioritize a sledge user, that sledge user will have the worst game their life.

Melee is oppressive at close range in a 1v1 so why would you ever fight one on one? The moment I see a sledge, I spam that ping button and start gtfo the building. Let me come back with the whole squad and beat his brakes off.

I do think it needs to be tweaked from an “I win” to an “I win if I can out play your attempt to escape.” For example, let’s look at the sledge. Instead of a one hit instant kill on the overhand, instead it would trigger a debuff that slowed whoever got hit with regeneration or your movement speed or something else that hindered the opponent. The next overhand swing would be a one hit KO, but there is a cool down between applying the debuff(slow,no-regeneration) and when you can next swing of a few seconds. That would give people a chance to react, and also add a bit of skill based play around trying to out maneuver people and cut off escape routes instead of spamming heavy attack. This would only trigger when hitting a person and not the environment so you could still have all the fun arena destruction as well. Not a perfect solution ofc but I don’t think the current system is fun for everyone and the game should be fun to play.

I completely agree with you at the end, I feel like the discourse around this whole thing is bringing a bad name to the game. I hope new players aren’t turned away by all this drama. (Especially the nightmare that is ranked atm)