Then again, if you make a pure stealth character with no weapon skills and expect to just ghost through the game on your first playthrough, you're probably not a very monocled guy to begin with.
Yes, it's more like hipster "pseudo-monocled".
"Look how smart and civilized I am! I'm gonna beat this game without killing anybody, on my first try. Because violence is SO crude."
I bet you are telling yourself that to excuse blatanty broken game design. The truth is AP was advertised for its stealth (the whole "espionage" thing?) and it sucking ass cannot be forgiven. To be honest even shooting sequences were blegh. Gameplaywise the whole game sucks gigantic cocks. I can only forgive it for having interesting take on a story and a couple of gimmicks associated with it (dossiers and how they worked was pretty sweet).
Eh, modern espionage game, I took to mean as a game in the style of the Bourne Series, or similar in theory to a more diplomatic Splinter Cell. Not to mean, "This will be just like Thief. Only not." Because that style in not what modern espionage means. More than that, in the interviews when they were talking about it. They mentioned things like Bauer, Bond and Bourne as the types of people you could play. The three B's of Espionage I think one person said at some point. You could intimidate your way through, going in with violence and kill em all tactics befitting Bauer. Or you could charm your way through, using cool devices and gadgets to get through your opposition, though mainly relying on mastery of diplomacy and a good bluff to avoid most of the violence, akin to Bond. Or you could sneak and skulk about, relying on stealth, like Bourne. But inevitably with all these, due to your characters own pride, your enemies skill, and the fact that you have to rush in situations like this, you will get into a knock down actiony brawl. These are the archetypes you see in the plot lines of modern spy movies and TV shows. Show me one modern(From the 90s onward) spy movie where the character doesn't get into a fight at all?