[Autumn]

it might be the fight that occured last night where I displayed just a margin of control with book smack on a slower target than I, with 70% hit rate and 4 initiative mind you, and those book smacks stopped the person I was facing from triggering a cherry blossom to heal.

I mostly had in mind a fight where as a tank with heavy armor taking 0 damage from the book smack I was locked down and prevented from taking more than one action per round for 20 or so rounds while someone slowly hit me with their extra momentum worth of spells to win. Keep in mind a tank has no way to crit and you pretty much always get full value from the booksmack, any time you can move and hit someone that isnt a duelist with a booksmack you gurantee they can use one less skill on you.

What are you talking about? if you get hit with book smack and have 5m left over, if you critically hit the person who is now in front of you you gain 1m back from the critical hit, and thus gaining your action economy back. (5m > 3m)

Of course this is not an assured way to regain your actions, hitting elemental weaknesses is not common so that can be ruled out easily, but there is always 1m movement and a few 2m movement options as well, as well as ways to move and attack, the possibilities of how you can handle getting book smacked are pretty vast, perhaps maybe in some scenarios you may not actually have the option of being able to deal with it, but in that streak isn't that just a weakness in the build like many more before, like not having crit evade or not having status resistance?

Also please explain to me exactly how in this situation you just described where book smack doing 0 damage every turn gives your opponent superior action economy, literally how aside from dual wielding duelist shenanigans? Doing 0 damage with 4m just to deny your opponent 1 action a round but then limiting yourself to only 1 damaging action per round is just a neutral state where in both you and your opponent are taking only 1 action per round.