Entirely with you. This is at the fine tuning stage, it isn't game breaking and we have nearly a year to go. Easy to forget that we are in early access when so much "appears" to flow smoothly. A Fallout GOTY edition is more buggy, has more conflicts and crashes more often than this does. I've had 4 in over 500hrs. For me, coming across from Warband (native, Console scrub), Bannerlord seems an awful lot easier to both start and progress through. I can grab an Aserai Skirmisher in the character build and have over 10k worth of weaponry to start, sell it and kit out or have the capital to start trading and have a caravan or workshop within a few days of entering the game. I've read a lot of people complaining about grinds and we had the whole XP change but I struggle to think that these people have much experience of the game historically. Great to make the game more inclusive/easier for new players but the investment required to achieve anything is what made so many of us keep coming back. Rapidly progressing to domination is what a million games do, we don't need Bannerlord to do that, that's not what made it so special and looking good doesn't matter if you play the same as everything else. A lot of the suggestions (including my own) end up making it just 'more of the same, as the rest' and not the game that these wonderful bastids over there knocked out for us. It's the being refused a dozen fiefs before getting the burnt out hulk of a town or spending a year finding a wife and another 2 making Daddy happy, only for her to die in a siege because reasons.
(Opinion, not intended as a statement of fact regarding how or why other people play the game).