Ehh the rest of the stuff is debatable, hence why I kinda left it to only the online. It depends what the player wants to get out of the game.
Which leads me to my opinion. I'm going to be honest here, I'm not a fan of the online pvp in general in the series. I'll get that out of the way. It never felt solid to me, and rarely have I seen people experiment in the games.
The concept is good on paper; in execution it's kind of hit and miss. It's very rare that I have a duel that felt good, more often than not some technical issue drops in that makes it feel like someone was jipped out of a fair fight (whether it was my opponent or myself).
I guess this could be due to my playing the majority of the series on PC though, which has its own set of issues that the console versions most likely do not possess (different computer setups, whether someone is using DSFix or not which changes a bunch of settings, PC specific issues, and so on).
As far as controls... I dunno, I guess I kinda liked the slight clunkiness to it in DS1. You had to be a bit more deliberate with your approach, and it felt more planned out overall.