Even light/medium linkers? (Not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious.)
Personally, I’d be in favor of IG doing a pass and adjusting all light auto doubles, as well as (if the understanding I’m getting from LCD is accurate?) all light and medium linkers, to make all of them unreactable. I don’t know how you’d do this with linkers, maybe you’d make deadly certain that light and medium linker animations correspond with one another perfectly for longer during startup, and/or reduce the break window at the end, so that the effective time between first true “tell” and last breakable frame is sub-15 frames, hence unreactable.
But then again, I like my clean abstractions. I don’t like fake reversals that you’re supposed to develop really precise OS tech to stuff out. I didn’t like it when Wulf’s jumping slash became reactable. I’m more interested in decision-making than I am in reactions or execution.
I don’t think combo breaking is easy in KI, though, or that mindless mash breakers are doing well against good players. I comment more on guess breaking further down.
Whilst I hope I’m not the one who derails the thread with this remark, if I have any problem at all with PD buildup and whatnot it’s the per-hit linker scaling on select characters. I’m not entirely surprised by your remarks that it’s an intentional balancing mechanic or that it’d take months to rebalance if it were changed, but I think many of the characters with per-hit linker scaling could stand to be given better reasons to prolong combos, fish for lockouts, attempt counter breakers, etc, and transitioning them to per-linker linker scaling seems like the best way to go about it.
I mean, you are apparently looking to tweak risk-reward (EDIT: which, like the linker scaling, would surely take months and months to balance, right?), and I think the ideas implied by the survey are far less palatable than removing per-hit linker scaling. Certainly, nerfing combo breakers yet again whilst leaving per-hit linker scaling in the game would leave a sour taste in my mouth.
They sped this up again. It now appears immediately.
KI’s combo system is basically the only combo system in current fighting games with any intellectual depth beyond the hitconfirm, and you think it’s “rather braindead”? 
lol, I wish more people saw it your way. I don’t particularly want to see juggles hurt more, but I’m very sick of the tantrums over S3’s “emphasis on juggles”.
That said, I don’t think we’d hear the end of it if juggles got any kind of widespread damage buff.
Oh, you’re one of those guys.
Look, KI’s offense is really good. You don’t get to do wind kicks and jumping slashes and powerlines in Street Fighter. Winning the neutral isn’t an indisputable demonstration of your superior play, and as such it makes sense that getting the damage doesn’t end with the confirm. And the braindead mash breaks lead to a 40% combo more often than they stave off half of the 20% that a non-lockout combo would likely deal. So if you’re indeed facing a braindead masher (and you don’t suck at confirming lockouts) then you’re going to cash out more, and if you’re getting broken a lot then you should respect the immense decision-making skill of your opponent.
Ultimately, KI is a game built around the premise that it’s okay to slaughter the FGC’s precious sacred cows – if I win the neutral then I get the reward, if I bait the reversal then I get the reward, etc – as long as you put in place mechanisms that allow you to preserve the risk-reward of the situation whilst interpolating away from the traditional mechanisms. You see this with things like KV (we have good light button confirms in KI, but unlike SFIV they don’t dominate in part because chained lights open a combo with a huge KV penalty), PD (punish a reversal with heavy xx shadow opener and you can probably expect to cash out 40% on average due to the PD buildup and opener damage, variance induced by breakers aside), and damage (I’d be a little uncomfortable with the expected combo damage against a reaction-only breaker if the offense wasn’t stellar or if there weren’t big-damage outcomes to bring the hype, but it is and there are). It makes KI a very interesting experiment, and a catalyst for new ideas in an otherwise fairly stagnant genre.
^Still one of my favorite posters around here. 
Anyway, as I alluded to above, I’m not exactly thrilled by the kinds of changes that appear to be on the table. But I did make some suggestions a while ago that I think are worth tabling here.
From Infil’s counter breaker exposé thread:
Number 3 in particular might be the buff (and especially, the peace of mind provider) that some people in this thread seem to be looking for. I like it a whole lot more than tokenizing combo breakers, at any rate.