Totally agree with your ending, it is so frustrating when you see the potential of the bannerlord's world an it keeps being rough and unpolish for so long. My conclusion is that their vision is a battle simulator, the world is just a container where you fight battle after battle... design to be in a never ending war, they won't improve the RPG part of the game.
WB + diplomacy mod features was the minimum that I expected for BL... but nope, it is not 'the vision'.
You and many of us, it looked easy but… you know
I do agree. They just needed to take a look to most popular WB mods and implement these ideas in Bannerlord... but they ignored them and implemented their own vision which is the opposite of what most players expected.
IMHO they focused the efforts on combat, everything else is unpolish/unfinished/half developed/call as you want ... it is a big shame because the parts to build something great are there.