I am pretty sure that the devs' tests are going in the same direction, mostly because it is pretty evident that you can defeat the AI easily if spamming archers (00:15:40 for archers battle), while cavalry is much harder to manage effectively and while the result is much worse.
Only problem here is that AI can't defeat player easily by spamming the same archers. Which is why I am saying that it's problem of the AI and not the archers been OP themselves. If you make archers weaker, or other units stronger, you will just make AI archers even more pathetic then they already are. That's not a "balance".
Right now you can at last make conscientious decision to not exploit AI and not spam archers if you don't like it. If devs do "balancing" as some players want, you will be facing weak AI archers that you can't do anything about.
The balancing is pretty subjective, yes, but if you are getting infinitely better results if recruiting X unit instead of recruiting Y unit, there is not needed to be a balancing expert to know that something is really wrong with these results.
Maybe you want cavalry to be relegated to a 100% support role, while other people want cavalry to a more deadly role, etc. Who is right on this? Well, who knows, but what is pretty evident is that archers make feel cavalry and infantry useless because you do not need anything else if spam archers. If you get a different unit, you clearly know that your army is underperforming compared to an archers spam army.
That's correct. I am just saying that the the players look for that "wrong thing" at the wrong place. Something wrong is the AI, not the archers or cavalry themselves.
Concerning the Archers vs Cavalry question, well, if the cavalry is able to reach archers in melee, cavalry should be able to inflict massive kills on these archers, but it is not happening currently because cavalry AI is mediocre as best and miss a lot of hits. Anyway, there is not much sense to argue about if cavalry AI should be improved or not, because at this point all people do agree with everything related to improving AI, plus devs have already confirmed that cavalry AI is getting improved, so people complaining about cavalry bad performance can be happy now.
I have nothing against improving cavalry AI. Quit the opposite, that's exactly what I am suggesting instead of making it bulletproof and able to run through hordes of men with spears without blinking or taking damage as it was in the Warband.