What does Valheim need in terms of combat/weapons?

I was looking at the road map and was a bit surprised to notice that the Cult of the Wolf update deals with combat and enemies, but "combat improvements" was listed separately as a stretch goal. I'm not sure what Cult of the Wolf will contain exactly, but I've been thinking for a while about things I would really like to see in terms of the combat and weapons:

1. Difficulty settings

I know that there are people who primarily like Valheim as a building game, which is why I think ideally there should be settings for combat. I enjoy building stuff, but for me it's ancillary to the exploration and fighting.

As things stand right now, I think combat is a bit too easy. A difficulty setting could adjust things like i-frames when rolling (which are currently too high IMO), parry timings (which are currently too forgiving IMO) and even enemy aggression. This is definitely not the easiest way to adjust difficulty, but it's 1000x more interesting than just slapping on more health and damage to the enemies.

2. Serious rebalance of weapons

One hander + standard shield is by far the most powerful melee setup.

Bows are also amazing.

Spears have weird hit detection issues.

The Battleaxe and Iron Sledge are objectively terrible. Honestly I think the damage (for their tier) is fine, I'd rather just have the devs up the speed considerably. Their current state is particularly galling because the Dane Axe on which the Battleaxe is based was not a slow weapon in real life, so why does our mythical warrior have such a hard time swinging it around? I'm tired of developers in general hyperfocusing on speed differences when balancing weapons when they could be looking at other attributes to balance weapon types. In Valheim for example, shields are extremely powerful so simply not having access to one is already a huge downside.

The Atgeir is in my opinion decent, although I think it has some of the same hit detection issues as the spear.

Tower Shields are absolute dogshit.

Sure, it's a PvE game and balance is obviously not as important as in PvP, but internal balance also matters.

3. Light armor

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. It'd be nice to have more options for light armor.

(Sidenote: I really hope they don't put plate in the game. Plate in my opinion is overdone in games and does not fit a game about Vikings to begin with)

4. Sort of, this one is likely never gonna happen

I kinda wish they'd make one handed war axes and woodcutting axes separate item classes, just so we could have one handed axes that are actually on par with swords and maces. How to differentiate them? Simple, make Axes do 50/50 slash/blunt damage. Gives them a unique selling point, and makes sense as well.