Beta melee mostly feels worse than live.

There are so many weird downsides to the style now. Punish and chaos roar got their adren stripped. Assault and Hurricane had 10% adren cost tacked on to them. Melee has a whopping three basics (one being dismember that you're not using in zerk) on lengthy cooldowns that can benefit from Jaws adren, as the autoattack doesn't get the adren. Pulverize got the EZK changes baked in, but it's also no longer an ultimate which's a large nerf with vestments.

There's even some random nerfs that are unlikely to affect much, like 10 seconds added to the cooldown of barge. Just why?

It feels like melee got a noob-friendly meteor strike and the hurricane spam meme, but in return took a ton of nerfs. EZK-buffed smash is totally gone for example. The style still has absolutely nothing to do outside zerk, the dismember chain doesn't do anything to change that. On the other two styles, I almost never use the autoattack bind and melee feels like it crutches on it a lot.

Tl;DR melee had the worst adren of the combat triangle previously and somehow it got even worse.