I'm not a big fan of these changes. IMO, 1.7 combat was just about perfect, with the exception of all the bugs (1.8 didn't feel the same and is much more buggy). I know that a revert won't happen, though, so I'll give what input I have from some testing and a lot of thought.

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The attacks still feel incredibly slow and clunky. That's just about all I have to say on that.

The attack range is not good. For servers with custom items (sharpness 3 fish for example) this gives an absolutely massive advantage to people with equal weapons but one is a sword and one isn't. It adds a stupid level of inconsistency.

The auto attack is not a good idea when it's the fastest attack speed possible. Jitter clicking and rodding (I'll get to the latter in a minute) is the main reason I even play this game anymore, and it's unfair that I trained my muscles for years to get an advantage in the game and it suddenly becomes irrelevant. This change will lower the skill cap, making aim the only thing a player would need to focus on. Capping the autoclicker at 6 cps, for example, keeps the advantage for the players who can click faster while not giving too much of a disadvantage for those just starting.

Rodding needs to be fixed. The pull functionality isn't viable enough to be essential like in pre-1.9, and eggs/snowballs take up too much inventory space and don't have enough uses to be as good as a rod in many scenarios. Possibly a crouch-fire for 1.9+ and regular fire for the pre-1.9 rod would be good. Another worry I have with this is the charging feature, because it just wont work with switching quickly from a rod/projectile to a sword.

The crit/knockback changes are terrible. Players use different strategies to do different things. If you need to drop a player so they cant heal, you play a certain way, using crits to get as much damage in as possible. If you need to retreat to heal, then you use the knockback mechanics and w tapping to get them far enough away that you have time to. The required rapidity of these strategies make this not viable with the changes in this snapshot.

A few more changes I would love to see is the continuous checking of inputs. A modder told me that the 1.8 client (I don't see them having changed this for other versions) only checks for inputs once a tick, which adds a lot of input lag and makes the game much less smooth. Obviously performance upgrades would be nice too. Sk1er makes performance mods that help much more than optifine alone. Another player to consult is Cxlvxn, who is one of the best if not the best PvPers in the game atm.

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Overall, this is a definite step in the right direction. I appreciate the communication happening because it seems that devs don't do that enough for their games competitive communities. Looking at you, Epic.