About knifing, people who are being targeted from the front by the knifer become invulnerable during the animation, all the way until the moment when they perform a successful counter. I suspect that this is somehow related to animations (and that it's intended). I don't think that this one will be patched.
When it comes to spawn protection, from what I've gathered it's only active during transition from deployment screen. That makes it a very small window, which actually is pretty understandable - I mean, who would want to get shot before even gaining control? For that reason, I don't think that it will be changed either. One way or another, it doesn't depend on us, as we're a player-based support forum. If anything will be changed, it will come through DICE LA devs from CTE.
