[SolAndLuna]

Agreed on knockdown not completely removing all Evasion DR, to be honest. Knockdown has become a fairly common status effect, and people can easily use autohits as well. It feels incredibly disappointing when you put together enough evade to trigger Evasion against just about anyone, only to then find out that it did nothing because they can just hit you with a knockdown (Domino Resonate, Pulling Shot, custom tomes, Typhur sometimes, etc) and you don't even get the 30% damage reduction you should from it afterwards, especially when you then remember that you could have put together 40 Defense and Resistance in place of all the Celerity and Luck needed to ensure you dodge basic attacks.

In fact, here's what normally happens when, for example, a Kensei tries to basic attack an evasive build, in my experience:
1. Kensei picks Sidecut
2. If Kensei sees 70-80+% success rate, confirm attack
3. If Kensei sees that hit rate is too low, cancel and swap to Kagekiri or any other skill that can hit the opponent

The only difference in this scenario between a defensive or evasive character is that if they can knock down, they can remove the chance of an evasive character having any defenses to begin with.

Your best option if you absolutely want to run classes without any methods to improve damage reduction as an evasive character is to somehow painstakingly add Defense and Resistance on top of all the other stats you needed, and having a character add points to almost every stat in the game generally isn't considered the best idea, so it commonly only works with the ones that didn't need many stats to begin with.

As far as the other options... Well, despite me wanting to be able to use every class well as an evasive character as well as a defensive one, I do understand that doing that by globally increasing damage reduction can cause some issues. Perhaps the "glancing blow" idea mentioned earlier in this thread could help with that? So you'd get less DR from Evasion if you only got it to trigger by luck, and you'd get a little bit more if you dodged because they didn't have much of a chance to hit you anyways, or something similar.

Despite that, I think the second option is likely to work better for most people in general - providing specific tools in each class that would allow for the ability to use classes for evading better, either by adjusting the existing ones (allowing them to trigger on Evasion as well as evading a basic attack, or powering them up to give extra DR, or anything else) or by adding new ones to any class that needs them.