Part of those problems come from a rushed development, mainly the movement gimmick. The movement gimmick was going to be a bit of a skill expression thing, where if you are closer, you can deal more damage (and you can), but when you are further away, your style is better because the trick visuals are better. The blue moves are trick moves, and it seems they might have been a bit undertuned, as yeah, they don't sway your battle advantage enough. Generally using a variety of moves allows you to push your advantage better, and the tricks are there for that. The combo system was made around that idea, and I was going to give more incentive to use combinations of moves more (there would be multipliers in the code) but I ran out of time, even after working a lot. I had to focus my attention on fixing bugs over refinement of the system. It was an overscoped game, as you could probably tell!
Really good point to bring up, but the tl;dr is that I ran out of time to do balancing and make those moves more useful overall. The main use in the current game is to use before and after attacking moves to keep a good combo up!