I mean, you basically just made my point for me. You just said that SP is currently failing as a sandbox title AND that the MP is just straight up bad, hence why it didn't retain its player base. Bannerlord is supposed to be a great sandbox experience with a decent MP experience, and it has currently accomplished neither... so here we are, with Bannerlord having the playerbase longevity/retention rate of story based SP games with content that runs out within 25 hours.
Maybe I'm circling around the same idea.
My angle was that the numbers are a weak point to criticize the game over. Every case for having more players, you can just claim it's because of EA:
+The game should have more players because of sandbox replay-ability
-Doesn't have full sandbox elements yet
+Modding
-No modding tools or major mods yet
+Multiplayer
-MP is unfinished
Despite being EA, the numbers are in-line with the other releases of March.
This is why the lack of a roadmap is so significant because it prevents us from giving focused feedback. Our negative feedback can always be answered with "well it's just EA," even from the devs perspective. Also, I'm sure the devs agree with us on quite a few issues, but there's some behind-the-scenes stuff that they have to get through first. We just don't know because there's no roadmap.
The base of a good game is there, it's just covered in non-attuned mechanics with only a skeleton game around it to test. Some stuff like no duel mode after 1 year makes zero sense. Unused maps that are disabled when everyone asks for more maps, ect.
At this point, I don't think even TW expects anyone to play the game, except what I assume is a couple of teams that were invited to the internal testing. But it's there if you want to play it.
Most people I know are waiting for the upcoming patch. Hopefully it's significant.