Peasant classes is probably what turns people off the most, especially in sieges and TDM. Peasant in Skirmish seems an acceptable choice that never really bothered me and the peasant rush in Captain mode has been a good strategy in the past. But when it comes to big scaled pvp battles, playing peasant feels like someone is inserting a baseball bat inside your uretra.
There is something deeply off about this gold system because even when you keep a 50/50 KDR, you end up playing peasant most of the time. Peasant should never be something mandatory, it should be a optional pick that you choose on purpose in order to save the big bucks to afford playing a strong class like heavy cavalry.
The way i could see it :
-We are NEVER forced into peasant classes, we the minimum gold we start with beginning of each rounds is enough to play the Middle tier classes (such as voulgier, spear infantry, skirmishers, low tier archers, etc.)
-Playing Peasant would be like making a "save round" in order to start the next one with more money, allowing you to afford buying heavy cav, heavy inf or heavy archers. You start the next round with the the extra gold (for example, if the peasant is 100 gold and we always start with 120 for voulgier class, we have an extra 20 gold next round, whether you got rekt or not as a peasant).
-If you then get rekt as a heavy tier class after having saved bucks as a peasant class, you lose your heavy tier class and can either play mid tier, or choose to do another save round as a peasant to be abble to go back to heavy tier classes. In any case, you are NEVER forced into a god damn peasant wearing a Nike t-shirt and calvin klein boxers as armory.
That way peasant would not become irrelevant, but not forced on anyone. The way it worked on Warband assured that we were always starting as a "mid-tier class" and when we chose to lower our armor, it was a personal choices for the sake of movement speed or affording a strong 2hander, never ever in Warband did i feel that i was forced to play a TRASH loadout like it is the case in Bannerlord.