This has always been an issue with Lithe.

granted sprint burst is offset by needing to walk everywhere to not use it or get it to recharge unless its been changed recently. have not looked at it for a 6 months or so

Can you present examples of "validation hits" at windows? Those would be instances of your client thinking you should have hit someone (and making that clear by playing the according animations) but the server disagreeing and overruling the client, negating the hit and correcting the animations. This only ever happens on pallet stuns or Dead Hard (if the killer has a significantly higher ping than the survivor, that is), it does not happen at windows or out in the open because there is no general hit validation in this game (well, at least not up until ludicrous killer pings of around 300-400+ms, but even then it does not function reliably at all).

Auto-aim causing killers to hit objects instead of survivors is definitely an issue though, rare an occurrence as it may be, and it's really curious BHVR has never managed to get a handle on this. Years and years ago on one of their regular dev streams back then they rather comically clarified on this saying it's technically not "auto-aim" but "aim-dressing", meaning that if your client registers that you are going to hit a survivor, it simply adjusts your camera to make that hit seem more visually sensible. While I doubt that's all it does (hurtbox and hitbox are fairly large so even things that don't seem like they would be aligned for a hit can hit, but it basically makes you turn 180° if the survivor is anywhere within that cone, which seems excessive and leads to silly things such as Nurse players being able to just swing out of blinks without even really looking at or altogether seeing the survivor and letting the "aim-dressing" gods take the wheel), that of course does not change the fact that this issue exists and seems like it should be remediable - if anything the fact that it's supposedly not auto-aim but merely "auto-adjust" should make this issue even easier to remedy, as with the client already having recognized that the hit should connect, some random object then coming between the killer and survivor in the camera-adjustment process should not be difficult to simply ignore. I'm not sure what would be so difficult about implementing a rule in the code that essentially says "if the 'aim-dressing' mechanic is called, the hit happens no matter what". Obviously however with hit validation checking whether it was only the killer's ping that made their client deem the hit possible in the first place.

It would be really interesting to see DbD be played sometime with the "aim-dressing" code simply disabled. I wonder what it would actually do to the ease of getting hits on survivors that you barely or actually can't even really see on your screen, as well as whether it would even really look or feel that weird to get those hits without the camera adjusting to them.

exactly. Killers always get the down even if you've already vaulted a window and are some meters away already