I get that you don't want the game to be tactically thoughtless.
Look at it this way.
Right now:
Shield infantry can make archers almost irrelevant with their shields with no tactical effort.
Two-hander infantry can shred shields, and destroy shield infantry in a fight, with no tactical effort.
Horse archers can defeat any infantry who are without a shield or throwing weapon and unable to catch them or outshoot them, with very little effort (follow command+circle).
Archers can out-shoot horse archers with superior accuracy, negating their effectiveness, with no tactical effort.
Pike infantry can brace their pikes to absolutely destroy charging cavalry, with no tactical effort.
gosh, I wish tactics could be like that in BannerLord. Sadly, the combat AI makes traditional counters trivial. In battles the AI will do one of two things: turtle up in a corner or charge.
The AI turtling up should be good if it is defending, letting their archer shoot accurately, letting spear-infantry brace, and shield-infantry keep their shield wall intact. But unfortunately this is BannerLord; the AI will generally bunch up their archers making them easy targets for your own. The AI will put its infantry in shield wall, making spear-bracing ineffective. Yet shield wall is terrible in combat as troops will eat each other hits. yet the it will still keep that formation until their bitter end.
The AI charging is no better. Archers can somewhat effectively shoot and run forward, but crossbows can't. Infantry will not hold their shield up when charging, preferring to raise the weapons up as if they can strike someone 100 meters away.
I think AI combat is so bad that people believe if TW were to actual fix something it would break the game balance, its "everything is bad, so nothing is bad" kind of balance. And that's sad because it's true. However, AI combat being bad isn't an excuse for keeping cavalry in the stat that it is in. what happens when TW fixes the AI to properly set up a line of spear-braced infantry in response to a cav charge? will people whine that infantry is too strong because it's working properly? what happens if armor gets buff so that acts like actual historic armor, will people complain that "archer are bad now, please nerf/buff!"? After launch they had to nerf horse-archer hard because they were the few units that behaved exactly as you'd think horse archers should, while most units didn't.
heavy cavalry should act and feel like heavy cavalry, with all its strengths and weaknesses. The least they can do is add stumbling to infantry when they are charged by cavalry.