Sorry guys for the long silence, the truth is I have gotten very little done lately, too much other work to take care of, like I feared beforehand.

Luckily, after monday I should have more time, and will try and make a sprint - we?ll see if that?s enough.

About the sword/shield position, yeah that?s from the 3rd person -> 1st person animation system, lots of things look and feel very different.
You're probably already going to fix this, but in DR 5 whenever you bash in the 3rd person view, you hear the successful bash sound regardless of whether or not you actually hit someone.
It?s not a bug in DR, but a mistake in the 5.0 package. See the sound is actually "in" the VANILLA animation itself, and DR
fixed that already with a replacer animation - but apparently I forgot to pack the 3rd person bash animation replacer in the 5.0 pack. It?s a not a big thing, and many people already had the files from v4, so I didn?t reupload just for that (didn?t remember either).
All in all, if you want you can download v4 and take the blockattack.kf file from its meshes\characters\male folder into the respective folder in your installation.