I guess you were expecting a very different game. I would challenge calling that "poor execution" though. I personally found the difficulty, the danger of combat, and the atmosphere to be the game's biggest strengths. I was looking for a game that properly made you feel like a medieval peasant.

Too many medieval RPGs are about fulfilling a power fantasy as some kind of badass, but I really liked that KC:D was more about the vibes of just being a relative nobody in a historically accurate medieval simulation.

That's the whole point of the first game, you're a scrub. Literally a peasant and that fighting isn't like in Zelda where you're a complete badass, nope just a scrub ass peasant who happens to have a sword. That's why I think this game had such a divide. You either loved it or hated it.

I had the same issue at first, but once I learned that the game actually expects you to spend some time in the training ring with Bernard to both level up Henry’s fighting and build your own skills, it got a lot better. The game will let you do one round of training and move on, but you should do quite a few to level up, and you should revisit the training ring periodically as you level more to learn new techniques.