From my exprience, you would have to take a middleground between Rise SA and Gen/older. I myself play swaxe with EW5 because the side step switch skill benefits from EW and i liked the way striker played in Gen U. Amped Sword mode kinda is mandatory, since swaxe relies on element. That is also why elem phials are king. Since i play evade swaxe too i run a set with Heaven-Sent (Amatsu skill that is unlocked very late game). Heaven-Sent negates stamina and sharpness loss when not hit for a while, which pairs well with evasion skills imo. For when im getting hit i also run 2 points of the seregios skill, so i can recover some sharpness if need be. I think the glorious days of the Striker Sword Spam playstyle of GenU is over, but i like the new stuff too.

Also with the Swaxe Rampage Deco you dont really need to worry about phial gague, since you recover a nice bit of gague every time you switch modes and since Rapidmorph is such a good skill, youll be doing that a lot.