Would it be possible to enable shield bashes, for the reason mentioned above, that any kind of dual wielding will very quickly overshine shields simply because you have two attacks *and* two blocking chances, even though smaller?

They need not neccessarily do lot of damage, but giving them at least some offensive capability would nicely balance them against high damage, lower blocking of most other weapons.

I'm not sure, but defining shield as melee weapon instead of as an armor in gear.h might do the trick?