Part of what is missing for me is a reason to go to villages. I basically only go there in Bannerlord if there is a quest offered whereas in Warband there were many reasons to go there - trading, recruiting, donating money to a poor peasant family, looking for bandit fights and assassination attempts are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
While the town based economy in Bannerlord is a very much better system I don't get how the villages fit into the gameplay loop of the player. Sure they drive the economy but not in a way I have meaningful interaction with. They are pretty useless interactively for me since I don't raid and the quests, although good in theory, are very hit and miss. I get sick of the notables telling me "you don't have enough troops for this" (brigands/deserters) when I could crush them singlehandedly, for example.
If I don't have a reason to interact economically with villages (which is what I would prefer) then I need other reasons to interact with them. Dropping in to see what the blue exclamation mark is about is fine but there needs to be 'so much' more to them than that, imo.
Can't relate. In warband 99% of going to village was to recruit, same in Bannerlord. Only difference being: more villages in BL and no need to visit all of them to get full army.
Trading is more in there in Bannerlord than Warband imo (it's really the same), but in Warband there was little to nothing to gain from it, in BL because of the economy you can find some great priced products in some villages, and sometimes villages are even necessary to get something like Cows/livestock.
Donating money? haha what?
There also was no "looking for bandit fights" or "assassination attempts", there was just a small possibility of getting ambushed by bandits when recruiting although no that's not a reason to go visit the villages, rather a rare consequence (I do however think that BL should have similar random events).
And thinking about quests, at least there are a few more and varied quests involving villages in BL.
They recently updated raiding in Bannerlord, I think it was fine even before but now it's a lot profitable as well.
One exception being village upgrades, but due to the amount I think it's much better to have them tied to castle/town, heck even in Warband I'd never manage more than 1 village or 2.
I'm not sure other than more quests what you would like to see in villages. If you don't want to do quests or raid that's on you.