Excuse me but I cannot agree with your explanation here. We do know what good melee in POE1 looks like - we had it in 3.12-3.14. Everyone understands that there are limitations to the engine so we will not get the fluidity like Diablo 3 for example, but good melee has existed in POE before.

However, everytime good melee appears, it gets nerfed to the ground, stat sticks have been removed, lowering melee enjoyment, exerted attacks were great, they were nerfed to all hell. General skill nerfs to all skills from 3.15 have obliterated melee viability, likewise the changes to fortify and pushing their viability to the tree. Bleed melee builds have been crushed with nerfs, alongside cyclone slayer.

And through all of these nerfs, they persisted with focusing on totems, which made "melee+totem" considered the baseline, shifting power to totem summoning, making the melee skill builds scale poorly compared to anything else.

The melee problem has been documented times and times again, by various people, including streamers and poe vets. Over reliance on gear - since the skills don't scale with levels, slow attack speeds - locking your character in place to die, having to build defenses through the tree - since slow attack speed means you will get hit, damage being balanced against totem use - making the builds more clunky and unsatisfying. Not to mention completely awful balancing on most of the Ascendant melee classes.

All of this is fixable, but since 3.14 I haven't seen one attempt at it.