If you are trying to reward skill, then try to make the throw an instakill after a certain range, and make the arc a bit less (I mean it's pretty unrealistic as it is).

But I always thought this was a game of smarts anyway, and the knife was just a way to be able to cause confusion, or kill 2 people in the room at once.

It's fine to say that if you were allowed to choose your Traitor Teammates, but you can't, it doesn't seem like an issue of balance, but an issue of fun, yet the balance has been made whacked.

A GOOD traitor team is going to blitz through even without knives, but with a new player, they may as well be innocent.

The other idea, is knives are as usual, but knifing a detective does not give you a credit.

I agree with this, as a much better solution for stopping the cheap instaknifing (not that I don't instadeagle anyway). The knife isn't overpowered, specially since it often gets into innocent hands, and the current knife has no reason to get it (like I cannot really see myself ever choosing it over tonnes of other options, and when I did have it, I used my deagle instead anyway and held knife for entire round). Putting a delay on knife purchases means the innocents don't get instaknifed. I rarely get knifed as D because I stick to groups anyway.

Feedback from other players has been rather poor, and we've been finding that average players who aren't a good shot are now completely useless as Traitors, and thus innocents have been winning over and over and over again.

The delay on the knife is a fairly huge amount, and also takes way to long to resheath, I could really only see the knife useful as a quick stab in a crowd to make paranoia, but the huge delay there removes that use.