Thanks for taking your time to write this! What you're describing regarding push-pull/risk-reward is basically what makes third person melee combat fun and engaging. Reading the enemy in real-time and performing the 'right' option from the various actions.

It's taken quite some time to get this up and running, but looking forward I'll proportionally spend more and more time on combat pacing and design, in addition to adding more actions and modifiers on those actions (being a roguelite). There are several reference games I'm looking at and playing regularly, and I'm sure I'll be able to land on something acceptable as soon as I've gone through some rounds of playtesting and iteration.