The sword meter can also be charged gradually by grazing bullets (graze radius is about 3 meters), maybe that's where the free meter was coming from?
and heck performance issues again, think i mentioned it on discord already but i'll def be addressing those postjam; some of the performance-minded infrastructure that was put in place for yuuka souls 1 postjam didn't make it into this one because of how many systems got rewritten from scratch, plus those 34 soldiers sitting in the basement having their AI active at all times probably aren't helping much