The idea: treat light attacks as medium attacks with a short charge time, and start scaling those attacks at 0 damage at 0ms, with say ~80% of a spammable in damage at the 1s mark.
In an earlier thread I suggested to put LAs on the GCD with skills. But even though it is an improvement over the current system and anything that was suggested at the time, that concept has some issues that this new suggestion does not have:
1. Some people (who are wrong in my opinion, but whatever) say that LA weaving makes the game feel "fast paced", and putting LAs on the GCD would take it away.
2. It would require a fairly big rework of skills and sets within the same patch cycle.
So here is how treating LA damage as medium attack damage would address these issues:
The animation of a light attack will be kept, and aside from the damage that the attacks do, everything remains looking and working exactly the same. So when you hold down the mouse button for <100ms (or whatever the max is for it still being a light attack now), visually you do the same as what you do when you do it now. This attack triggers all the effects and benefits from all the bonuses that it benefits from on live now. So if you are a nightblade that is using the Undaunted Infiltrator set for whatever reason and you do your usual rotation with LA weaving, your light attacks will deal at least the 774 damage from the set + the proportion of damage that they would do for those few milliseconds that you held down the button, will add charges to your Grim Focus skill the same way they do now, and will restore the resources from Siphoning Strikes and Incapacitating Strike. If you hold the mouse down for longer, the mechanics for medium/heavy attacks start applying exactly the same way they do now.
If this is implemented, aside from a general straight forward rescaling of skill damage or enemy HP bars, the only changes that would need to happen are changes to the Blood Moon set and the Empowered buff. That is definitely a small enough amount of work to be acceptable even for a dungeon DLC patch (this addresses the issue 2 with my previous proposal). All the other changes that would need to happen could be spread-out across following patches, because the combat system would remain functional.
Now for those who like LA weaving because it makes the game feel "fast paced", you still have a reason to do it. There are sets, BIS sets in fact, that work with light attacks (for example Relequen and Siroria, as well as a ton of non-BIS sets, and possibly some new sets in the future). This means that "high APM" people who do LA weaving properly, and build for LA weaving, will still have an edge over everyone else. So those who like RPing as epileptics can still do it and be rewarded for doing so (addressing issue 1 with my previous proposal). LA weaving builds will be an option similar to HA builds now.
What this approach would also do is further increase build diversity. You will no longer be forced to choose between an LA build by default and a niche HA build if you really-really want it. With this change you will get a 3rd competitive option that does not exist right now: a skills-only build.
This will give "low APM" people an intuitive build option that is actually viable. But as opposed to putting LAs on the GCD, people would not be forced to change how they play.
An issue that this concept has that the "LAs on the GCD" does not is that LA spammers will be out of luck. But the same is true for what was tested on the PTS a few weeks ago, so I suppose it's an acceptable loss for the sake of addressing the skill gap between the biggest "low APM" group and the top end players while not forcing anyone to change the way they are playing.