You know, that actually makes a lot of sense…
At first, I thought you may have just been referencing the more substantial guards on many sabres, but that is a feature of a given weapon, not upon the spectrum of curved swords as a whole…
…So, instead, what I would wager would be that due to the curvature, a little bit of wrist movement can result in a lot of displacement of the blade, if you will. As per actual torques and what have you, I suppose if we’re interested enough, we could try and get some numbers up and run them to see if a curved blade might have some sort of leverage advantage, or if there’s something else going on.
Going back to the wrist movement, a curved weapon covers an arcing pattern from the line of action of the hand, and therefore can kind of be in a lot of places at once. A straight weapon doesn’t do that nearly as much.
So, right on then! Not sure how much of that would stand up to rigorous scrutiny, but it does make sense to me at the moment – thanks!