Bannerlord
The benefit of levelling up is that you gain attribute and focus points which help you level your skills faster and further, though the more you level up, the more experience you then need to level up, so levelling becomes slower. Feels slightly counter-intuitive.In my opinion it's poor design that the benefit of levelling up is to be able to level up faster while levelling up takes longer each time you level up.
While you do get perks while increasing your cap on skills by levelling up, you find that it sometimes takes too long to level up your skills even though you've levelled up enough to max out the rate at which you can level up your skills (5 focus points etc) This makes the levelling up process feel pretty unrewarding and shallow as it takes ages to level up while not feeling like you've levelled up at all. The majority of the perks provide small and hard to notice differences, especially in beginning to mid game.
Funnily enough, if your skills are very low level, and you have a lot of focus points, you level up these skills extremely quickly (Until a certain point). This process also feels unrewarding to me as these levels don't feel earned or meaningful.
Warband
When I think about my experience with Warband, I felt like I could really feel a difference from when my character was a low level to when I became I high level, I can't say I feel that with Bannerlord, especially on the battlefield. My weapon may be better, my armor may make a slight difference, but my character feels very ordinary and boring, and perhaps this was intentional, but does it make for a more enjoyable gameplay experience over Warband? Not for me personally.I can win a few Tournaments in Bannerlord and equip some of the best armor in the game, in Warband, I can't even wear the best armor until I've earned that right by levelling up and increasing certain skills that allow me to wear it. These kinds of shortcuts in Bannerlord make earning things feel really unrewarding, but hey, it's not like armor makes much of a difference in Bannerlord anyway.
In Warband, each level up you had opened up a lot of important choices, which could take you some time to think about unless you had a specific build in mind. Where you placed your attribute and skills points felt like an important decision and also every skill point you put into a skill felt impactful and useful, some even necessary. With Bannerlord, all my skills level up individually and it's a simple choice between 2 generally lackluster/forgettable perks, it doesn't feel as exciting to me.
Though this is just my underexplained opinion.
Thoughts?