The hitbox detection is awful, the servers' ability to deal with even good ping is awful, nevermind how awful the ping that you can typically get is.

The movement in general is just extremely jumpy and jagged, and the hitbox suffers as a result. Inherently it tends to be really janky from how people can instantly switch from going 100% full speed one direction to 100% full speed in the other direction, as well as insta-crouch and the fact that the looking is directly tied to movement but you can dodge a ton of stuff by looking straight up or down is silly, frustrating, and makes no goddamn sense.

However, I respect the fact that it takes a lot of skill to play the game regardless. But a lot of that skill is mastering all the TONS of "dead spots" in hitboxes that shouldn't even be there in the first place.

I used to have fun seeing how many screenshots I could take in a single game of my sword sticking straight through a guy with him taking no damage, back when I played on my brother's account before moving out. It's an insane amount. And no, my ping was not bad, in fact it was better than the majority of the people on the server (30 to 40 most of the time). And that's generally the best ping you can find unless you're hosting the server yourself.

If you can easily and regularly take screenshots of your sword sticking straight through the center of a guy's chest and he takes no damage, the game is pretty janky. There shouldn't be any argument about that.

Conceptually many of these things are good mechanics, but they are either badly coded or badly designed in that going halfway is often worse than doing it at all - such as having the slow swing, hitbox detection realism attempt but NOT having any attempt to force the player to accelerate rather than being able to switch from full tilt left to full tilt right in a fucking instant.

Well put, this is the only reason i moved on from chivalry. Plus the whole novelty of swordfighting is kind of lost when you get instantly killed by people crouching whilsts facing the opposite way of you. While i can respect the skill involved in learning and countering these techniques, i simply have no interest in a competetive environment where slowing down your sword to a standstill by dragging and still instantly decapitate enemies from the non moving sword happens on a regular basis.

It'd be mechanically dead if the kinds of 'jank' animations that are tied to looking were removed/slowed, and same thing for dragging.
I mean, take a look at America (kek) all they do is feint and play with kite shields like lil' bitches it's hilarious, and it's all because they think reverses and body feints are 'jank' or 'unfair'. I get that sometimes, if you're not too aware of the active hitboxes of every weapon you use/fight against, you can have weird situations where you think you should have hit the other person. I get that mastering these weird situations is kind of a brick wall for new players, but if it was all neatened up, and all the ROH and RLHB, along with hitboxes being tied to mouse movement was removed, you'd get Smash 4 all over again.
There'd be the vetrans who have sunk 500-5000 hours into the game to get better and push the boundaries of what's possible left playing on even footing with a bunch of idiots because there'd be no creative ways to play. It'd be all lmb, block, riposte, block, wait, overhead, block, etc. Because all dem mechanicals 2 hard 4 me. The game would essentially be reduced mount and blade combat, but slower.
I'm not sure about other countries, but down in AUS we have a dwindling player base where a lot of average players are getting sick of the 'jank' and the vetran players are leaving because they wipe the floor with even our 'best'. On the other hand all the middle-upper range players are filling spots, getting better, and having fun, and we're also getting a lot of new players who are putting in the hours in duels to learn the intricacies of the game and enjoying it. We even have some feinting duels happening, which was very uncommon in the land of spin2win.
tl;dr Chiv is weird, but not broken, in my time playing I've only had a few situations where it has 100% been the servers/games fault that I missed.