I'm trying a dual wield character and the only solution i've seen posted after searching that work are mods requiring script dragon which doesn't work whenever the game patches so i would just be swapping one annoyance for another. is it just not possible to fix this any other way?

Dual wield parry has 4 different .esps. Only one of them requires Script Dragon.

As above. You dont need script dragon to run the other versions. Anyway, make a backup of your tesv.exe to counter automatic updates. Seems bethesda has calmed down a bit with the updates. Btw, Im using Dual Wield Parrying with a 360 controller and its awesome.

Thanks for the suggestion but after looking at it I see no mention of fixing the hotkey problems, it just seems to add the ability to parry which I don't really need/want, unless i'm misreading it?

best solution i can come up with is tweak the tempering recipes to add stronger duplicate copies of the relevant weapons instead of the vanilla upgrades. afaict, base, unupgraded weapons will go into both hands at the double-tap of the hotkey. but, this would be a tedious process to go through, and wouldn't affect modded in weaponry.