Yeah, I've been ignoring Blessings entirely, but I've been thinking about starting a merge project for one of them since they amp up your score on-season. And I don't have a particularly good project for my orbs atm.
I would be more bothered by the skill restrictions if DC weren't so powerful, winning is so trivial. Well, 'was' trivial. I do have to give IS credit for making Arena challenging again, since it almost feels like the early Arena days where you had to plan a lot of things out and think ahead. It is a little fun, Arena was trivial before. But the bonus unit changes really exacerbate the problems with the score-based system. It narrows down builds even more (to be entirely buff-oriented), completely invalidates over half of your skills (for the most part, the weapon, A skill, B skill, and special for your core team is meaningless), and now forces a certain playstyle (feeding all your kills to the bonus unit). It's conceptually flawed.
I like the addition of Death Blow 4 because it promises a direction where there'll be a lot more options for points. It's no longer just DC. If they don't intend on changing the scoring, then their willingness to add options and increase diversity is a good one. Like, if they add a Shove skill that costs the same as Dual Rallies, that would be incredibly interesting.
But they need to fix that bonus unit change because all that increase in diversity of skills will be meaningless if we can't use them. I can't really come up with a good solution for all this.