It is very low. You can't seriously say that Bannerlord takes as much skill to be really good at as warband. in BL the skill gap between the good players and the really good players is very slight whereas in warband that gap was actually a meaningful one.
But the reasons for the low skillcap are nothing like what the OP posted. Customizing classes and having tons of keybinds? ew, come on, that's not what's wrong with BL. Oh god, please don't include a million skills and 50 keybinds, that would be awful. The most fun part of the M&B franchise is that you don't have to play it like a time-sink MMO where a lot of the skill is based on just knowing what tons and tons of abilities do. I love that you can't customize your skills in WB or BL multiplayer. It's so much easier to jump right into, and much more fun for new people - so they can focus on gameplay, rather than figuring out how to customize their character to be viable. It means that playing is much more based on how well a person physically plays the actual game, rather than on some vast pool of game-knowledge.
The problems with BL skillcap, as far as I can tell (after maybe 50-100 MP skirmishes so far, and based on 1500 hours in WB / WFAS), seems to boil down to a few key things:
- Combat is wayyyy to slow. People swing really slowly and it's very plodding. It also seems much harder to fight multiple opponents, probably due to the speed.
- Way too many weapons have crush-through. Fighting a skilled player? Take a 2-hander and just overhead swing repeatedly, something will get through.
- Throwing weapons are ridiculously overpowered. Ability to one-shot with
shoulder hits with many throwing weapons, not even head-shots, is just crappy.
- That "weird arm-swinging-around thing" makes it hard to tell where attacks are coming from. So even if you're really good at the blocking and maneuvering mechanics, it's just easy to block in the wrong direction. It's something I use by accident to kill much more experienced BL players over and over.
- The hitboxes seem weird and not intuitive. I've had one of those players with the 750-win trophies successfully block and counter one of my attacks and whack me with an axe, but it somehow it glances? and barely damages me, even though it was a clear solid hit. And my clumsy sword swing takes the guy down (because the glance didn't stun me), even though he "beat me" in the physical combat. It's crap.
Those are the problems, it's nothing to do with skill customization. that's just conflating M&B with completely different game styles. It's just the combat system needs improvement in multiple areas. I'm hoping they'll get there over the next 6 months.