I'll admit, for me, seeing a massive bruiser like a troll murtalating everyone with a pool cue while the wired elf can barely knock someone out with one breaks suspension of disbelief for me. Doesn't bother me for movies, but for games, having only STR factor into melee just tastes bad. Muscles are more then just raw power. Speed, flexibility, reaction time, all play a roll in armed hand to hand. SR does a better job them most showing that, but it still falls short. Given same skill level, the bruiser troll and the wire elf should really be doing about similer damage with their improvised staves. The troll sure is relaying all his muscles power to knock people out, but the elf is using his muscles speed to apply force in the same way via basic physics (mass x acceleration).
Plus there's factoring in the material that the weapon is made out of. The above pool-ball-pokey-stick isn't going to be able to take the full force of the trolls strength. It'll snap with the first blow, only dealing damage up to the point it breaks. Any strength force beyond that is wasted for anything other then some scratches down the poor sods body. Personally I always felt melee weapons needed a range of strength that applied to them. A minimum to represent how strong you needed to be to even use the weapon effectively, up to a max were beyond you hit the point of weapon breakage/over-penetration. And that doesn't even take into account weapons that rely more on speed and precision then brute force to do their job. A rapier or whip would favor the wire elf more then the bruiser troll. Putting your fist in someones face does tend to make more use of raw muscle mass then weapon combat (though weapons should still tend to give advantage of some sort). Martial arts rules in a later combat book will probably shake that up too as so many of them rely more on precision then strength, or just turn your opponents strength into your weapon.
We have been told that, while strength isn't factoring into melee weapon damage, it's still used in hand-to-hand in other ways we haven't seen yet. Hopefully in a way that makes it's application more flexible and the various types of melee fightn' can be pulled to the fore rather then just bruisin.
Just my 2 nuyen from the other side of the valley.
Let me make my bean-pole stave-spinning wire-rider frag it!