Swords is the suit that gets skipped, and the case for reading it properly is stronger than its reputation suggests.
Its association with the element air and with the intellect is a Golden Dawn assignment of the late nineteenth century, and the connection between thought and suffering that follows from it is an interpretive tradition rather than a necessity. Nothing about a sword requires that thinking be painful. What made the suit painful is a combination of that attribution with Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 illustrations, several of which are genuinely bleak, and with a much older cartomantic habit of reading the suit for conflict, litigation and bad news.
What the suit actually handles is the part of a situation that is being decided in words: arguments, agreements, diagnoses, judgements, the things people say to each other and the conclusions they draw. That is not inherently unhappy. It is simply where the unhappiness usually gets articulated.
Read that way, a Swords-heavy spread describes a situation in which the decisive activity is analytical rather than emotional or material, and the appropriate advice is usually about how the querent is thinking rather than about what they should do.
The suit's genuine warning, and it is a good one, is that clarity has costs. Most of its darker cards describe a person who has understood something and would have been happier not understanding it. That is a real category of human experience, and a deck that had no cards for it would be poorer.