As far as I understand, when they designed the skill tree and created this kind of development mentality, they must have thought that the gameplay will take hundreds of hours, so let's not rush and make the development of the player slow. But something is wrong here.
I haven't used any cheat and -according to Steam- have been playing the game for 15 hours. Yet, I possess two castles, a lot of caravans, etc. But my skill levels are so low, especially compared to the other lords. The level-up system must be speeded up immediately.