It pains me to post in the midst of flood of other whines, so I'll try to be
brief.

Martial artists do pretty cruddy damage and get lousy hit points to begin
with, perhaps they at least could get a counterattack skill and be able to
'riposte' at full power.

Oh, and the idea with shields is that you're already giving up a weapon so you
can effectively deal with incoming attacks, so I agree fully with the idea
that shield users should not suffer a reduction to attack speed when parrying.