Wow, things blew up here while I was gone for the weekend...these things were confirmed and everyone got into a tizzy, lol. We've talked about these same things before, but just to be clear on what I think is going on here/what the focus I think should be:
I really don't think we're looking at the existing shard system having these inputs. As we can see from playing the demo, yeah, it would be unnecessary because there are already simple controls in place to use those. I don't think we should worry about that, going on about how it's pointless and useless, etc, since that's not what we're really looking at from what I can tell. This will probably be for weapons and any possible innate abilities Miriam has like Voltic Chain/those others from the special moves update last year. They -could- use special inputs for certain shards, and I think that would be fine, as I'm sure there'd be many other ones that didn't use such inputs that would be favorable for different players.
It's not totally fair to pick on specifically Alucard's spells as being unnecessary because honestly, you could also completely ignore other entire systems, like the subweapons and familiars. How often did you think to yourself, "Oh man, I need to get x subweapon for this boss!", "Where's the Bibuti?!" ...more like, "...wait, what even was the Bibuti? I don't remember that..." So many options were put into the game just for the sake of having a fun variety, as often back then we weren't so worried about what was the best. So many little things that were in SotN were not strong, but were almost enhanced in endearment because of it. They put a lot of work into making something like the Sword of Dawn specifically, extra sprites and animations and programming...all for what? Because it was a really unique, artistic touch that they thought of and put it in the game because they loved what they were doing.
That's the most beautiful thing about these games, imo, just the amazing variety of ideas that the developers were able to get into the game. It's not a seriously hard or competitive experience, so I don't think exclusion of their creations and ideas for the sake of a more balanced by limitation gameplay environment. At their core, these games are about exploration and discovery, finding new things and trying them. If we're scared of anything, imo it shouldn't be more stuff.
The plethora of (mostly bad) options in SotN didn't and doesn't make it a bad game, and now we're looking at the possibility that in Bloodstained we could have many of those same options plus the ability to improve or upgrade them as we wish, be it weapons and/or magic/abilities.
As far as making the command input moves good enough to warrant your effort in executing them, I've talked about this before too, but that could be a risky proposition. If those attacks are in general just better than everything else because they require motions, where does that leave the folks that struggle with them? They will be behind, and will quickly know it from reading around on the internet. That's bordering on something of an exclusion of potential fans, so if the best moves in the game are "motion" moves, then it should be more or less because that player buffed up that weapon or ability to be that way, or built their gear and playstyle otherwise around it rather than it just being "do the move". Someone else could pick up a baby Claimh Solais and take their crafting down that path, that weapon being strong with just its basic attacks. However, perhaps that weapon deals partly "holy" and cut damage and some important enemies are resistant to both (I was going to say wind with Crissaegrim, but wind's not in these games haha)
One of the two weapons would likely be at least somewhat objectively "better" than the other, but these games shouldn't be about that. We're exploring a castle and finding out what little bits of love IGA and his team were able to leave in there for us to find. There should be a pretty decent challenge along the way. Worst case, we have several options to have a different, more difficult experience.
edit: Oh! One other thing I believe crocodile brought up, nah, I was specifically thinking about motions like pretzels when I mentioned "unfavorable" motions. Very few people want to have to do those in a game like this, ever. 720s? Probably not. Maybe just something incredibly situational and infrequent and again, not required/necessarily very strong without adjustment on the player's part (crafts, shard/gear loadouts, etc).