I found the Reaper Crest and anons were right, it definitely does help the combat immensely to get rid of the cringe ass diagonal downslash. However it doesn't fully alleviate the feeling of being gimped during a fight. The Reaper Crest's moveset is kind of gimped in other respects: you can't swing fast and your up-attack is behind you for some stupid ass reason. "Oh, you want the game to not be clunky? Suffer." - TC. You still can't chain pogo due to the slow swing speed and how far upwards the pogo sends you flying. Enemies are still programmed to leap backwards 15m after every swing like they're Elden Ring bosses so you can't get a retaliatory hit in, especially not when they also enter guarding stances whenever they're not attacking. The combat loop still mostly feels like "wait for your chance to matador the enemy and maybe get in a second hit if the stars align." My feeling is that this is still dragging itself out way too hard for how little drops the enemies give and how many of them take as long as full-fledged HK minibosses to kill.
Also, I dunno if this is the intended first playthrough experience, but I'm needing to conserve so much silk to heal that I'm basically never ever pressing F to launch my needle. I'm also so perpetually broke that I've bought practically none of the tools for sale. The resource economy in this game is mega fucked up. Oh yeah sure maybe on a hypothetical playthrough 2 when I'm better at the game this loosens up. Am I particularly inclined to do that playthrough 2? Not really do far.
Ultimately, I feel like this game has fallen for the "games don't NEED to be fun to play!" brainrot. The default control scheme is unnecessarily tryhard clunk and since that's the intended experience any powerup you get that could potentially help out comes with a giant laundry list of compromises to make it clunky in other ways.