So I fiddled around with the dev console a bit, and found out you can declare yourself a kingdom, with all that that entails. You're able to create armies and vote on your own policies etc. You can actually turn vassals away from their lords. At least, i saw the option for it. Unfortunately my reputation with that person I tried it with was terrible so they refused to listen to me. Havent tried it again.
I agree with everything you're saying. I think the only major issue right now is snowballing. Theyve already fixed a ton of stuff. Apparently there's a memory leak as well but as in have 32gb of ram, I havent really noticed