"The big problem was that to get past the censors, they had to hack the Kyoto-arc to death. Bad metaphor"
LOL! That surprises me, because even in the Japanese "Kenshin" I thought the violence was pretty toned-down with a minimal amount of actual death. There are US cartoons that I find more objectionable.
I agree on dubbed Sano--when I listened to original Sano, he sounded totally different. English-Kaoru was somewhat whiny, but she wasn't half as bad as English-Merle crying "Lord Van!" every five minutes :)
See... what sounds really cool in another language can be very dumb in ours. And "Lord Van" isn't as fun a car-game as "Van-sama!"