I really appreciate your attention to detail and your extensive posts on any forum!
I agree with many of your points but:
I directly compared playing the early game of the newest vanilla version of VC and the Balance Mod. The latter breaks many quests you can normally do in vanilla. E.g. Looters, bring cargo to X, bring amount of X. In consequence I found it almost impossible to act locally, like you say in your post. It also makes it much harder to find adequate bandit parties. The problem here is that those quests and (in vanilla) size dependent parties are an essential part of the early game.
You make the point that you want to give more scope to stuff like being a merchant. The thing is, it already is basically an early game grind in vanilla and the mod change to travel and weights just penalize it by adding more resource drain instead of adding to it or making it more interesting or dynamic. The spotting nerf goes against your recommendation of more liberal Ctrl-Space.
The balance change of that is a more exaggerated difficulty spike of the early game. Imo better handled in PoP and Awoiaf.
You often bring the argument of equality between player and AI (lords). Isn't that superficial? So many mechanics in the game are player only or AI only. You nerfed e.g. unique items with the argument it's unfair to the AI. That is funny when many of the big difficulties the player faces like morale and relation management is player only. AI troops just get many items out of thin air, not available in any shops. The player needs to steal it from them to gain any access. Fairness between AI and player is not really something you can view on single issues.
The access to ladies inventories is just a role play thing to make gifts? It's definitely a preference but I find the menus get more cluttered by changes like this and the 'manage every town like your own' entries.
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Your mod isn't a balance and fix mod anymore. It's really a collection of some fixes and all sorts of tweaks. I think you should be a bit more clear what you want the mod to be.
I can be wrong but I get the feeling you started it as a balance and fix mod but eventually liberally added tweaks suggested to you or in line with your personal play style.
I like the distinction between complete overhaul mods with a unique vision, tweak option mods and fix vanilla mods. It gets to messy if you try to be several things at once. Perhaps you can split the parts up or make more changes optional?