I think that something needs to change with the scaling influence costs, especially with the massive nerf to influence generation. In my current game I have to pay 1380 influence to overrule a decision in my kingdom and I can only generate 8 a day with almost every influence policy and 2 fully upgraded forums. Needing over 150 days of influence generation to combat one decision just does not feel right.
Also, why nerf the policies impacting party size? The stewardship tree perks don't work so those were pretty much the only way to get a large party together. Just seems completely unnecessary and anti-fun.
My main problem with this patch remains the lord voting on war actions. It makes governing a kingdom extremely frustrating since you have to periodically dump all your influence to prevent your kingdom from committing suicide. I think that even with smarter AI diplomacy it will still feel very frustrating since you never really feel like you're in charge. Maybe some kind of policy exclusive to player kingdoms to increase control would help?
I understand that player kingdoms are not a priority at the moment, but one of the big new features of the beta was the ability to create your own kingdom through the sandbox rather than the main quest. With the fixes to the player's ability to overrule decisions as well, I can only assume that some attention is being given to this aspect at the moment.
Essentially, the changes being made to reign in the crazy decision making of the AI is indirectly causing player kingdoms to be near unplayable since you effectively have even less control over your kingdom than you would as a vassal, since you are required to dump influence very frequently.
Until diplomacy is under control, I think just removing the AI voting on wars function for player kingdoms would go a long way to making the build more playable, as well as encourage more people to actually make their own kingdoms for testing purposes. As a side note, the dialogue option to make peace with other factions is totally useless with the tribute system, the game does not allow you to make peace this way any more.
