Asterix 说:
Sorry, and I imagine I will be Erdogan-censored here, but just wanting to say something different from all of the lobotomy-fanboys here.
You were wrong on so much of what you argued that I won't get into it, I can only say "welp, look again, paying more attention". Quite a few devblogs you can read to see the different, new and improved features.
It is easy to dismiss people who are (somewhat) active on the forum as fanboys that will defend the game at all costs, which of anyone here on the forum I am one of the most likely candidates to fit that profile. Yet I have voiced plenty of disagreements on development, with hopeful optimism, and that could be seen as white-knighting or fanboying.
But if your tastes changed that much from 2010 to 2018, you might be going through a mid-life crisis of some sort, and it is not this game that will solve it. If your taste changed so much you don't want a new Mount & Blade, and Bannerlord won't suffice it because it still is a Mount & Blade game, that is on you, my friend, and I would advise to look into games that will fill that which you want.
It is sad that the game doesn't reach your expectations anymore, but the long development time does not produce inexorable increasing expectations, that is what you unconsciously expect from the game because of delays.
I would argue this is "being used to the mainstream AAA budget development cycles", where if anything takes a month longer to finish, people expect a 3 hour DLC to compensate for that delay. TaleWorlds is not one of those developers, and I'm not defending them, I'm just stating a fact: they are different. They do not obey publishers' requests and demands, so they are not obliged to ever increase the number of features for each day they do not announce the release date.
Some close personal friends of mine have said pretty much the same thing: that the game is reaching that "unachieveable hype limit", because of how long it's taking, but this is their own subjectivity projected onto TW's business model. It has nothing to do with reality, but with unconscious expectations people have grown accustomed to because of EA, Ubisoft and the like.
Nothing personal against you, it's just something commonly seen on people who expect TaleWorlds to have the same business model as other publishers (and those big publishers are the one to blame, if anyone is to blame). The fight between
creative freedom/attention to detail/development pacing x
squeezing dates/trying to appease possible consumers with shallow stuff is exactly what led to Metal Gear Solid V and the schism between Konami and Kojima - the publisher pushed the developer into making an inferior product, because they were afraid of "more delays", and it led to a perfect metal gear game, for the first half of it, and then an incomplete mess for the second half.