With the exception of neven its always been hold moves will be stronger but youve never been able to pull eccentric moves wity something as simple as a button hold.
You have, just look at King Cerberus. Judgment Cut. Round Trip. Spiral Swords. Possibly more. These are not charge moves that get stronger as you hold the button, these are moves that are straight up triggered by a button hold, and bufferable just like 3's crazy combos. Some of them have been in DMC for years.
And actually - I can't believe I only remembered about this now - forget even about all those, a perfect example of the point I'm making was already in DMC4 as well, with Stinger being able to be canceled into Million Stab by holding the attack button while bringing the stick back to neutral mid Stinger animation. That stuff was literally, exactly the crazy combo you could already pull off from Stinger in DMC3 if you remember, just done with holding rather than mashing. They did this again for Vergil's Force Edge Stinger in the SE, in his case even eliminating the requirement of bringing the stick back to neutral after the directional Stinger input. You can just keep holding Y as you input Stinger and Million Stab will come out.
DMC already did what I suggested in the past, literally porting a crazy combo from 3 to 4 but with a holding input. For some reason they decided to only bring back the Million Stab one though, so in the future I'd like to see them come back in full as a concept, with the DMC4 type input. Would sure spare a lot of cramps and carpal tunnel issues for a lot of people.