The addition of actual melee weapons like giant swords, maces, lances, spears, physical shields, or the likes would be just awesome!

I also thought about that but still I'm not sure if it would be something good.
melee would be only just range one so they need a high amount of damage.
Because of hooks, charge and tp lots of players would use melee weapons. So why use something else?
But if you lower the damage why should you buy a melee weapon then?
Thats the stuff that came spontaneously to my mind.

The thought just came to me out of sheer variety. Perhaps for high damage weapons, add knockback as well? This would prevent spamming to an extent. I also thought about the addition of new legs that have a 3-distance hop/drive but provide no or extremely little HP boost as esoteric to 'melee' classes, or perhaps even a special type of chassis that is tailored to flexibility. Or maybe a spinner would be that swords have a small chance to partially deflect a certain element of damage (electric, explosive, physical), which would give melee guys a fighting chance. Not to mention the high-risk high-reward system of jumping into other guys.

I think melee weapons would be fun. I enjoyed the game more when multiple physical resistance modules of the same type could be used. It added a stylistic twist to each 'mech & allowed for specific types of defense. Today that would be handy as most of the upper level players tend to rely on energy weapons.