Its awesome on the characters that can support it.
I know plenty of people don’t like the design, but the only cases where melee hybrid builds are totally nonviable are Axton and Maya. Gagie and Sal both have OP8 functional melee builds, and Gaige can kill hyperius with hers (I don’t know if it was OP8, but it was done).
Even in BL1, 3 out of 4 had usable melee builds. It’s always been a feature of the franchise for most characters to have some capacity for melee, even if it isn’t a defining feature.
Not taking Zero and Krieg into account, that means 2/4 characters who weren’t designed with a primarily melee based play style in mind are able to perform at a high level with such builds. And that’s only for BL2. Once you start to factor in TPS, that game basically designed nothing but melee hybrids. There aren’t too many people still running pure melee Athenas or Clappys. Every class in TPS, whether through an override, damage bonuses, or other mechanics, is melee hybrid to some degree (with the exception of Jack, maybe).
As far as making hybrids perform better, I would introduce more gear into the game that could accommodate hybrid builds. In the same way the HoT is a spike, nova, and roid, and the shields BA Marauders have are amp and nova shields, I’d introduce an adaptive melee shield so that the defensive buffs would still be useful on non-melee builds. I’d tweak the numbers on melee skills by 20% or so, and have a larger variety of usable melee weapons (not the rapier, whose only use is as a pointy stick) so that there would be more incentive to use weapons with melee attachments (think BL1 Sledge’s Shotgun). Lastly, so long as they keep TPS skill trees for future games, I’d use those spots for some interesting melee overrides (like Wilhelm’s robo-fist and Aurelia’s backhand) or other effects that would benefit melee. The problem with a lot of the melee hybrid skills in BL2 is that they’re on skills that are kind of far down the tree, or their bonus is too small to make a difference. If you put them on a gamechanger, you can make the numbers bigger and give more “useful” bonuses to other skills.
Just my .02$.