Quote Originally Posted by Xihirli View Post
Which gels with all the movies, but Grievous deflects blaster bolts in Clone Wars.
Grievous cheats. He's been extensively modified with cybernetics, including on a nervous system level, which increases his reflexes. He also uses four lightsabers at the same time, which increases the odds that a given blaster bolt will be parried even if he had no skill whatsoever.

Quote Originally Posted by KillianHawkeye View Post
Which makes me wonder why lightknives aren't a thing. You don't need a whole sword for cutting most things, and a knife with an energy blade would put a vibro-blade to shame.
I think it's probably a matter of resource availability and cost. Lightsaber crystals aren't, say, as rare as Faberge eggs, since every Jedi or Jedi-in-training can be equipped with a lightsaber, but keep in mind that the Jedi are a relatively small organization tied into the high levels of a galaxy-wide government, so they can get a hold of those resources even if, on a broader basis, they're far too rare to be used for consumer goods. And since the crystals are a mineral resource, there's a set and finite amount of them within non-cosmological time scales, so a farsighted organization might make a point to deliberately ration them.