In the real world, a parry is just a type of weapon hit, just like a slash, stab, and overhead. It is simply such a move targeted at the opponent’s weapon rather than at his person.
Chivalry simplifies these to model them in the game, of course, but parry is modeled entirely differently than the other weapon hits, and much more simply: there is no windup / release / recovery, there is just a simple push of a button and you are committed to an action that has to play itself out while you watch helplessly.
A feint is basically the ability to cancel a weapon hit part of the way through. If you could also cancel a parry up to a certain point, you could respond to a feint, and then have some chance of realizing that it isn’t a real strike and cancel your parry, leaving yourself a chance of parrying the next attack. This would make the feint mechanic much more reasonable. Feints would still have a chance of making you screw up, but they wouldn’t be such an all or nothing crap-shoot.
That’s MY stab at a solution. But to be more abstract and long-winded, here is my take on what the general problem is:
In the real world, a feint doesn’t make you execute some action that you can’t recover from period; it makes you put your weapon in a position to block in one area, but which makes it more difficult to block an attack coming into a different area (which is where the attacker puts his next attack). It’s a much subtler thing than Chivalry is making it. Granted, Chivalry has to simplify how it models combat. The problem feint is running into is that the simplifications turn it into something very artificial and not very palatable to a lot of people. These simplifications and how well or poorly they model the real world need to be re-examined. All the complicated tweaking of the current model that are being played with are not going to solve the problem. You need to reexamine the model.