Polo Rules

I agree, 'beautiful' hooks can be quite cool (although I'd stop way short of describing them as one of my favourite things) but they happen what, once every ten games?

Contrast that with tens of crappy mallet-to-mallet swipes which break the flow and usually several blatant slashes in every single game (worse as tournaments progress towards the finals IMO).

I think of it like football/basketball - if you want the ball you need to get the ball. It's cheap, ugly and too easy to swipe at players' legs or arms, so they made a rule to prevent it.

By definition if something happens often in a game it stops being "beautiful".

Hacks are already against the rules, it's not the rules that need changing to get rid of them, it's up to refs to start calling it.