You're acting as if they had a choice between a finished game and an incomplete game. The choice was between no game or incomplete Early Acess. If anything Early Acess will speed up the development.
The game is in an active development phase, what do you expect?
I feel like defeated lords going to the cities while recruiting slowly would also help with snowballing as they would add to the numbers of garrisons. There could be a mechanic where they spawn in the city/castle with low garrison and get +5 soldiers every day. They should not be allowed to leave until they reach 50 troops? that way they're out of the map for at least 10 days(instead of getting captured by looters or irritating the player who just beat their ass) - whilst still helping against snowballing by garrisoning the towns. It was better in Warband where some of the lords stuck around in the cities till they had 100/150+ armies.
I agree, I made a whole thread about bandits too earlier https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/isnt-this-a-bit-too-much-bandits.413446/
fine steel can cost 800-900 and weighs 0.5 so it's vastly more profitable than the inputs. I made ton of money buying cheap hardwood + smelting weapons for steel and then refining it.
They're doable unless you're playing as a merchant and sink all your points in Trade/Smith/Steward and other non-combat skills. Then it's totally impossible.
Anything can be OP in singleplayer because AI is just easy to beat. I can use pretty much any weapon with similar success. The way to check balance is AI vs AI and Player vs Player. And In both cases, Swords are superior atm. In MP I for one have a much easier time killing a spearman with a sword than a swordsman with a spear (both with shields). The exception is unshielded sword vs unshielded spear but if that favored swords than the game would be completely broken lol.