I don't think there is really an appreciable difference between TW not caring about MP and them viewing MP as low priority, at least not in the outcome, which is MP becoming stagnate, not improving and dying. I'm also not sure how it's productive to come into the MP forum section and try to reason that MP being neglected is okay or reasonable because SP is more popular. That won't do anything to quell MP fans' frustration and is reminiscent of the arguments you occasionally see by toxic SP fans that say MP should have been entirely removed in Bannerlord to focus on SP.
I was trying out the deflection too and this does seem to be how the perk is implemented. It effectively turns your two-handed weapon into a long but very narrow shield while blocking. It seems very difficult to make use of it intentionally since your weapon covers so little space, so it might be better to think of the perk essentially as just negating a very low percent of arrows whilst you're blocking.
There's a noticable difference between the crouch animation and pick-up animation. The pick-up animation has the right arm extend to the ground to pick-up the item and bends the back to achieve this, whereas the crouch animation keeps the back straight and bends both arms keeping them at waist level. Your clip looks like the pick-up animation to me.
I think they considered Warband MP a failure because it was greatly dwarfed by the SP playerbase. I believe Callum said that no one was actively monitoring MP player counts before he joined the company (in 2016 or 2017 I believe), so his data came from after Warband's MP heyday.
I never said it was the reason for it failing, only that it used a similar system and that I disliked it in that game. The locking system was there to make it possible to turn and maintain your block direction and it is the only real solution to the major issue with this kind of blocking and that fix is still less than ideal for me.
I've noticed this too, but figured it was probably lords entering tournaments when they're not fully healed from battle.
I haven't noticed much change in skirmish match-ups while solo queueing either. The game still regularly seems to stack one team with clan kids versus a team made up mostly of players who queued up thinking, "I wonder what skirmish is?"
The funny thing is that is wasn't even true at the time. The mounted archer and nomad both had access to the Tarpan which was the fastest and most maneuverable horse in the game except for the upgraded Aserai mounts. Looking at the stats now though, the mounted archer still has the slowest horse in the game, and the upgraded version only brings it up to the quality of most regular horses, meaning it's only faster than the tough variants of heavy cavalry. The only potential horse archer that looks like it could be problematic is the Mameluke, whose horse it only really going to be run down by a Bedouin and has access to bow and arrows.
In the files, MP map folders typically range from 10-40 MB. I'm not sure if we would need to download all of that or even more, but I think it's safe to say Bannerlord maps are much larger. Using the steam workshop to automatically download the files you need would probably enable players to download these really quickly, but I'm not sure they'll take the route since they also sell the game of Epic and would probably need a method for those players to download maps too.
It was actually Callum who said it.
The argument could be made that decreasing the rate of fire of bows actually increases the skill of the class. With a lower ROF, archers now need to make sure every shot counts, favouring quality shots over just firing as much as possible. One way or another, I think it is necessary that archers do not go back to firing at the pace they were in 1.4.3. Also, your examples are pretty much irrelevant since Bannerlord is a much different game than OW and Quake, although I can see how some people might have confused it with a FPS when you consider how it played before 1.5.0.