Rogues worked fine before the patches, they were just counterintuitive, since you had to build them around strength, which is still perfectly viable (and is in fact my preferred method). In fact, for a strength based rogue, the patch is actually a nerf to daggers, since a A 50/50 split between strength and dexterity won't actually outperform the old pure strength modifier at the high end. This fact is obscured early in the game by the necessity of investing in dexterity to acquire dual wield talents, so it's a modest low to midlevel buff that does nothing to prevent daggers from eventually under performing big weapons and a high strength total.
Honestly, I don't think rogues are quite as good as warriors if you're not going to baby sit them and a babysat rogue still isn't as good as an equally micromanaged mages. But they were never, ever so broken that the patch could change things as much as people imply it does. The way the math worked out was that you simply lost a point or two of damage here and there per swing in the early game compared to weapons like maces, and that is such a small difference that it was easily more than made up for with poisons, since more swings equals more applications and daggers are the fastest weapons around. That's actually part of the reason the game went live with the dexterity bug-- it was never a game breaker, particularly once poison was factored in, so nobody in house really noticed anything awry with the difficulty, particularly since you're expected to eventually adopt swords anyway.
