Melee needs animations that look more exciting and more accurately reflect what is actually going on in combat.
I.e. a "miss" in D&D is not an incompetent attacker doing a clean miss like BG3 presents it. A "miss" accounts for armor deflection, shield blocking, dodging, magical protections etc. So a miss is actually the defender succeeding in deflecting or dodging. These animations would make combat look more intense while also not making the attacker feel like they suck. And heavy armor tanks need to feel like they just soak the damage, like... tanks.
Knowing whether or not the target is avoiding damage because of armor or dodging could also be relevant in knowing how to best overcome their defense. Like using entangle, hold or other immobilize effects on evasive targets. Not sure if 5e has ways to remove dodge AC like earlier editions but that could actually be a good house rule. Or if someone is tanky and their armor deflects a lot of hits, they probably don't have a lot of Dex so use Grease or something that attacks Dex.
+1
5e tackles "removing dodge AC" with the same blunt instrument is uses (almost) everywhere, applying advantage or disadvantage to attacks. Entangle and Web
restrain enemies, giving attackers advantage to hit them and giving disadvantage to any entangled characters' attacks. The only difference is, as you mentioned, Entangle is resisted by Str and Web (initially) by Dex.
But yeah, Larian could certainly do something to account for these types of situations. If you attack a restrained enemy and still miss, have the attack always be blocked by the armor rather than a miss entirely. It's silly to entirely miss a stationary target. If the enemy is taking the Dodge action, have all misses be dodges. Etc for other sources of advantage/disadvantage.
This would require a bit of effort, but I think it's worth it.
