Personally, I think the biggest issue here isn’t even the result of the nerf, but the way it was carried out. The actual results of the change were very different from its stated purpose, and even a week later ArenaNet has still been completely silent on the issue, not even acknowledging whether or not they believe an issue exists.
The patch notes stated that the change was made in relation to the Retaliation boon (The reasons for which have already been covered), but keeping Retaliation up constantly is still possible even after the change. The change was only a minor hit to a Retaliation build, which was the stated target, but a major hit to completely unrelated builds (Most notably a Greatsword-based Symbol build), a fact which was never even acknowledged by them.
I also don’t see weapon swap as a valid argument here. One could combine a Greatsword and a number of other weapons effectively before in a symbol-based build previously (which was what was hit hardest by this). As a result of this change, if you still wish to do so, it forces you to rely much more on your second weapon than you did previously. While this is fine if the question is “is a symbol build still viable?”, that isn’t the issue. The issue is that one weapon which was previously useful in that sort of build has now almost completely lost its synergy for no good reason. We can adapt and choose other weapons, yes (and I don’t even run that kind of build myself), but isn’t one of the selling points of this game supposed to be having these choices? We simply lost one of those choices as a side effect of something completely unrelated, and even then I wouldn’t have nearly as much of an issue with it if ArenaNet was communicating with us at all on the topic.
As a third point, this one a specific response to a point Fabsm’s previous post:
Greatsword has not become more of a “party weapon”. The only thing it gained in a party situation is being able to drop a leap finisher slightly more often. On the other hand, it lost the ability to create combo fields (which allies can use in turn) nearly as often as it could before, and along with it made the party support added by all of the symbol traits less effective. Effectively, the only sort of party benefit is that it increased how often we can use one finisher by 25%, while reducing how often we can use a party support option (the combo field, and with traits healing and applying vulnerability) by 50%. From my perspective, that hurts how much of a “party weapon” it is much more than it helps. All it did was increase our reliance on either party members or utility skills to provide combo fields for its finishers, not make it significantly more effective overall.
(Also worth noting is that if you use SoW, a few other GS skills, swap to another weapon, and then swap back after the 10s cooldown on swapping, SoW will most likely still have at least several seconds left on its cooldown. The only way you would consistently have it up when you swapped back was if you spent 10s in each weapon, swapping as soon as the cooldown ended every time, and hit SoW as soon as you switched back into GS every time.)