Realism; Strength is not important for swordsmanship(?)

[Gerrard of Titan Server]

I have no first hand experience in historical weapon-based martial arts, but I have some second-hand appreciation and fascination for those who do, such as HEMA.

Some of the "experts" and actual experts in the community have said in several occasions that strength is not terribly important. Skill is much more important. Matt Easton of Scholagladiatoria has even stated that during his time of teaching historical European martial arts to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, he hasn't yet seen someone that is too physically weak to effectively wield a longsword (aka a hand-and-a-half sword) with two hands. (He says that a little bit more strength is required for effective wielding of a sword in one hand, but still not that much.)

See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OIjpLSaYQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip-_vEPotYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cNO6uRqUcE

Is this true?

In terms of GURPS, a very strong person has a ST of 13, for a base Swing damage of 2d-1, which comes out to 2d+1 cut for two-handing a "bastard sword". A weak person has a ST of 7, for a base Swing damage of 1d-2, which comes out to 1d cut for two-handing a "bastard sword". Right? That's over twice the damage, which doesn't gel with my understanding of the above sources.

This is further informed by this one page that I found. It doesn't look terribly professional, but it's the only source that I've found. It claims to be measured impact force of a sword swing and mace swing with proper form and technique, vs "bad technique" aka hitting as hard as you can.

http://weaponsofchoice.com/extras/we...ort-and-force/

The numbers are quite interesting. According to this author, a mace swing with proper form has 10x less impact force than a full-out, "bad" technique swing, and a sword swing with proper form has 100x less impact force than a full-out, "bad" technique swing! Again, are these numbers accurate? It's incredibly difficult to find numbers on this. I lack all firsthand expertise in this, and it's hard for me to even sanity check these claims, and that's a big reason why I'm here.

If those force impact numbers are to be trusted, then it leads me to the conclusion that swords deal damage because they're sharp and because they hit vulnerable areas with proper edge alignment, etc., and generally not because of of the person's strength - except to the extent that is necessary to get the sword moving at speed.

I would guess that a relatively weak real world person can swing a sword about as fast as a very strong person, and thus the above numbers pass my initial, uneducated, "sniff" test.

If all of this is correct, this would mean that the entire framework and system in place for modeling damage with swords based on strength and swing damage is entirely broken.

Alternatively, maybe I'm coming from the wrong perspective. In a real fight, the first person to get get a cut generally wins, so maybe a very strong person would do substantially more damage with a sword cut with good form because of their strength, but it doesn't matter because the actual flesh wounds from a sword cut from a weaker than average person does more than enough to incapacitate a person most of the time.

I guess I'm just looking for comments, pointers, and general education. I'd like to understand reality before I decide if I want to ignore reality for being cinematic, and exactly what the difference would be.

Thanks for your time!