Hiding, disguising, or moving too quick for tells is a sign of skill, but there is a non skill based component of landing a hit, generally a mix of muscle reaction speed and perception. I've seen black belts differ widely in their ability to land a hit on another, and I would put them on a similar level of skill. At the end of the day, what is being represented isn't "fast", but a mixture of coordination and reflexes. Some people have a greater grasp of the intuitive concept of space, while others struggle with that while still maintaining an advantage through speed.
TL;DR: It's too reductive to argue that accuracy is solely represented by the speed of a strike.
... I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to argue here. Because Exalted's use of Dexterity doesn't represent what you describe. Those reflexes and perception come under Wits and Perception. You can have a Wits 1, Perception 1, Strength 1, Stamina 1 character with Dexterity 5 and they will
still be better at hitting you than someone who isn't an inattentive, half-blind, weakling with no stamina.
I would certainly support someone else going for a separate fix for Exalted's Dex bug. Of course, that bug's existed since V:TM 1e, so it's been in the wild for a long time.
The purpose of a game-system is to simplify the complexities down into something which can actually be handled reasonably without getting nonsensical output out from optimal play. The way Exalted encourages high Dex, low Strength and Stamina combat characters is nonsensical output.
This is true, but Talent is a thing that exists. There are people that, regardless of having the exact same level of physical conditioning will simply always be better than someone else with the same level of training.
You can represent this by setting some people Skill level higher than the same person, despite the same level of training. Or you can give them the same level of Skill but give the more talented person an inherent bonus, which is functionally no different then an Attribute.
RPG systems, as commonly implemented, deny "will always be better" for the sake of gameability - or at least restrict it to the story level. At a narrative level, sure, Heroic Mortal Bobo will always be better with a blade than Heroic Mortal Gili. But we're talking about the system layer here, where the reason that Gili is worse than Bobo is that they have a lower dice pool. In the case of the example you cite when looking at it from our system hax perspective, if you assume they have the same Attribute and the same training but Bobo is better, then Bobo and Gili have the same Physique, the same rating in their Style, but Bobo has a better Melee rating.
In fact, if you really want an example of how we represent "some people are just better", Enlightenment 0 characters are capped at 3 in an Ability. Enlightenment 1 characters can buy an Ability up to 5. So Bobo, if he's Enlightened, is simply better than Gili because he has an innate talent that lets him achieve his full potential.
Sorry, but this contains only a bit of truth.
There are examples of realistic characters who are dextrous but weak, to varying extent. Consider the following types of sports, all of which value dexterity, but which are ordered by descending focus on strength:
Wrestling, decathlon, artistic and acrobatic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics.
The first has Dex and Str develop nearly hand in hand, though mostly because of the existence of weight classes.
The second lacks weight classes, but cares about Dex more than Str because many of its events are prioritising coordination over strength; they still require having a reasonable Relative Strength, though!
The third pair gets even more focused on Dex, but you can't do it without Str 2 meaningfully; some go for Str 3, but that's about it - anything more will require too much muscle mass, and too much muscle mass is too hard to handle dextrously with the human neural system.
Finally, the last can go for Str 1, because it's all about Dex, and has very few actual tests of strength - it kinda requires enough Relative Strength to do stuff like handstands, but that's about it; it totally ditches Absolute Strength.
You have an important point about there being a difference between Dex and skill. However, I have personally seen enough evidence of Dex being a thing (both my parents were into sports). I've seen the example of Str 1, Sta 2, Dex 3-4 (mostly Dex 3 now that she's getting old), and I do mean Dex 3, not high skill+Dex. I say Dex and not skill because I saw her try out things she never trained to do, and each and every time she looks more coordinated than most people, and occasionally even does Dex-based stuff that other people studied for a couple of years and she didn't study at all better than those experienced people. Conversely, my father was into Track & Field, but had a notoriously low Dex, likely 1 in system terms, despite reasonable Str and Sta, and it was, once again, seen through the actions in which he wasn't well-trained (training did help him compensate his low Dex in sports). IOW, these couple of anecdotes confirm the theoretical, scientific studies of the topic.
I get that you have certain experiences, and those experiences look reasonable. But some of the conclusions seem hasty and missing the big picture and variety.
Sorry, but that text dump is irrelevant to how Exalted mechanises Dexterity. Given the primary impact of Dexterity as mechanised is at the combat level, the fact that it encourages aphysical builds like "Str 1, Dex 5" is a defect. Exalted is not an athletics simulator, so we don't need a full representation of human physicality. What we need is a system which doesn't mechanically encourage low Strength archers, which is bluntly ridiculous.
I am entirely willing to sacrifice the capacity to mechanically represent your parents in the level you desire if it means I don't need to see another Dex 5 character who bluntly shouldn't even be able to pick up their weapon, and we can disarm the Dex trap where people who don't know the system naively assume that a 3/3 Str/Dex character should be a better fighter than a 1/5 one.
Uh, not really. D&D divides attributes into Wis/Int/Cha too, but people generally don't, IME.
It's more that the Str/Dex/Sta split is vaguely reminiscent of the scientific Strength/Coordination/Quickness/Flexibility/Endurance split, but people conflate Coordination, Quickness and Flexibility for some reason.
That doesn't actually refute my point at all. The fact that the Strength/Dex split is unexamined legacy code from early D&D which made it into VtM 1e which made it into Exalted 1e doesn't mean
everything is legacy code from D&D.
In the physique-stamina pair, this leads to very interesting and also aphysical behavior-a heavyweight fighter, due to having higher physique and stamina, is actually more capable of landing blows than a smaller fighter with equivalent training. I am pretty sure if you went through sports science, this would also make very little sense.
No, it means they're equally capable of landing blows, until the fight goes on and the lower-Endurance character starts getting tired and either has to skip actions to take a breather, or starts taking penalties because they're getting tired.
That's not quite representative, true, but at the level of granularity of a 5 dot system it's within margin of error.
(And actually, I'd consider the larger fighter's reach advantage to be more meaningful. Which is basically just an example of how at a certain point, you just have to draw a line to what you try to emulate. That, or play Phoenix Command, eh
@Eukie?)
