I respectfully disagree. As annoying as it may be that this unbalance continues to be the case, I rather TW spend their time with new things or broken things. I am quite satisfied to wait for balance changes once we are closer to release.
Armour
is broken
It isn't worth buying squillion dollar armor because it barely changes your level of hits to kill at all
Because it's so weak battles end in like 3 minutes on average, the first line of troops dies or breaks in less than a minute of fighting
Because it provides such poor protection against ranged attacks that makes ranged cavalry and ranged infantry overpowered compared to melee cav and inf, completely destroying troop type balance
These two things combined strip almost all tactical value out of the game, boiling all tactics down to "sit token force of infantry in front of body of archers on hill" or "just watch Khan's Guards kill every other unit in the game effortlessly"
It's blatantly unrealistic and immersion-destroying
It's not satisfying to see your elite cataphracts you ground your way up for die to a ****ty low tier unit using rocks and farming tools
It's not satisfying that enemy lords or elite troops who are supposed to be a threat to the player, die in a single mounted swing
It means that players cannot spend much time participating in the FUNDAMENTAL CORE OF THE GAME - mounted combat - in any medium or large field battle or siege, because just a few stray ranged attacks are enough to kill you
The fact it doesn't work as intended, the vast list of problems that armour's weakness causes for itself as a feature, and gameplay in general, means that "broken" is entirely appropriate, because until it is fixed, we can't give accurate feedback on the wide variety of gameplay mechanics that it has an effect on.
I quite like the armour how it is. I certainly don't want to lose the fear of being hit, even by looters.
Then go fight more challenging targets instead of the lowest tier enemies in the game.
Looters should be able to gang bash the best armed mounted warrior, if they isolate or catch them.
Provide a reason for this because there is no realistic reason here.
I'm sure a looter with a falchion could break a few fingers or legs or arms if there's 5 others holding the lord still.
They aren't holding the lord still, not that an untrained unarmoured looter would ever manage to hold someone swinging a sword still in real life anyway without getting their entrails spilled all over the floor, so that's irrelevant
Richard the Lionheart and also multiple Byzantine monarchs spent their lives in the thick of combat, and the reason they could do this despite being a high value target was their high quality armor
We don't in game have the ability to replicate the lack of mobility a crush injury will cause. A limp, knocked to the ground and crawling, being unable to grip your sword or shield etc. An injury that takes half your health should also render you barely mobile, and less able to defend yourself from swarming looters. Until this can be replicated, I feel like we have a good balance - with looters able to take us down if we do stupid things.
That debatable perception of realism is irrelevant in relation to the massive list of gameplay problems that weak armor causes (see top of this post)