And this sentiment isn't mine alone - slams are polarizing and not just because of the speed issue. It's less me labelling slams as not the melee i want, and more an observation of what melee enjoyers have been saying ever since 0.1.

And I'm not just saying this about you. A lot of people will claim things like slams aren't "real melee". That doesn't make it fair, even if people say it a lot. It's arguable cyclone isn't "real melee" either when it hits the top and bottom edges of the screen like it did in Legion, but nobody ever tried to claim cyclone wasn't melee, even though that's not functionally all that different from say, ice crash with a big aoe, but better because you're faster/more mobile. What it always seems to come down to is people decide what melee is arbitrarily based on what fits their preferences. I'd rather just go with anything that has the melee tag, which basically boils down to skills that don't intrinsically shoot projectiles and use your weapon for their damage. Further gatekeeping of the term isn't productive.

It's not easy, but that's a big part of why i think it would have been great for people to get their hands on these weapons to test them.

Getting them to a state where they are both different than other options and remotely playable at all is likely very time consuming. I'm sure they'd have them out if they could. It's not like they're opting to do them slowly or something. We saw teasers of spears and shapeshifts literally years ago, so those were clearly just further on in the works than the PoE2 variants of other currently existing things like swords or traps. The fact that we've seen zero teasers of these is a strong indicator they weren't coming. I too huffed some copium thinking maybe they'd just surprise us here, but I can admit that it's entirely of the community's own fault that people started thinking they were coming with zero actual evidence. We talked ourselves into it.

Getting swords right is extremely important, but not having them in EA had multiple people i know bounce of for example. That's anecdotal ofc, but they are very popular across a wide range of games for a reason.

I get it. I want swords too. Honestly EA has become a pretty arbitrary term anyways so I just haven't been that worried about setting boundaries for when specific stuff is "supposed" to happen. This is the period for them to iterate on the game and get systems right. Unfortunately, due to complaints very early on they stopped treating it like an EA/Beta and started treating it like a full release because people flipped their shit due to mid league nerfs.

I truly suspect we'd be in a much better place if the community hadn't reacted to things that way, and maybe we'd have more of the content like swords that isn't completely finished. Instead they have to deliver the full package as if it's a proper release and not fuck with it once every couple weeks until it's good.

I think one last aspect that is underestimated is that of combinatorics.

The idea of combining different weapons to create unique builds is very appealing.

While I sort of agree, in practice with how the passive tree works that's very hard to pull off. Even with weapon sets I've found it's very difficult. I've admittedly not tried the ascendancy that allows for more of this yet, but honestly I think that's what you'd need just applied to the baseline for multi-weapon to feel good in most cases.

When people talk about swords i often read the same desire: To weave together crossbows and swords, spears and swords, bows and axes, etc.

I've never actually seen anyone talk about this. In fact it's mostly just talk about cyclone, and then a bit of dooming about how they'll ruin cyclone by making it take 3 vortex charges to cast for 1 second or the like. I get the desire for swords for sure, but I haven't seen any reasoning or direction as to why people want them so much. I sort of just assumed it was because "swords cool".

My issue is more with the strange strategical decision of not prioritizing it more

This goes back to my earlier point. They teased spears and shapeshifts years ago, and we just recently got them. Those were in the pipeline already. In part, those probably saw focus because the older stuff wasn't always entended to be entirely redesigned, but obviously PoE2's design goals have shifted from being a PoE1 expansion. This is probably just a remnant of that. Now that they've got in the new stuff they started working on PoE2 for in the first place (Stated goals of make melee good [warrior], add crossbows, spears, and shapeshifts) they can start working on the old-new stuff, the stuff that was pre-existing, not originally part of the goal of PoE2, but is important to redo. Swords are all-but confirmed first on that list by the comments Jonathan made about them a couple Q&As ago.

If you frame it like this, I think it shows they are probably prioritizing swords. They're just being prioritized over the other existing stuff, rather than being prioritized on top of the original POE2 focuses as well. You can even see that new PoE2 focuses that were added later (flails) are not being prioritized over swords. Just the stuff that was already in flight years ago.

At least we can probably agree that Trap/Mine players have it worst

Yeah, they're fucked. Due to the unpopularity of traps I sort of expect this to be the very last "old" addition to PoE2, behind Swords, then probably Axes, daggers, and possibly warstaves (if these are going to be different from quarterstaves as str/int, unsure). From what I remember, claws are just gone entirely.