I agree that the effects are a bit too much. I would like to see a size decrease of around 20%.
But i disagree about Melees being useless. They can quite easily clean the environment or move with skills. Thats the con for having higher dps without sacrificing that much memory slots.
I really like the addition of blessed and cursed surfaces and playing with these wouldnt be as much fun if the surfaces were as small as they are in OS1.