Warband has repetitive gameplay as well. Honestly I challenge you to play native for more than a few hours. It's just a less clunky but similarly barebones bannerlord.
I would argue vanilla Warband actually has more replay value and immersion than vanilla Bannerlord, as things stand currently. And it's going to continue to be that way until they restore Warband's missing features, which weren't
huge or anything, but made a noticeable difference.
Agree with the rest of your post heartily.
at the moment its not terrible but its not great either
I'd sum it up as "a slight disappointment".
Right now Bannerlord does a lot of things but doesn't do any of them well. The tactical gameplay is shallow; initially impressive to fight a 500-person battle but quickly they all feel the same, just blobs mashing into each other and dying too quickly to be worth issuing orders. The melee combat, especially combat AI, still needs work. The strategy gameplay lacks options, though it's getting there. The roleplaying mechanics are almost there, I guess. The immersion they're trying to achieve is constantly broken by trying to have a conversation with an NPC and running into placeholder dialogue, or fighting the same field battle on the same map 100 times. Overall, it can be summed up as: grind very samey looters/smithing in the early game, grind slightly less samey field battles in the midgame, and once you've painted the map, there's nothing left to do. Bannerlord has made some important improvements on the last game in the series but it's also gone backwards in other ways.
For me, what changes Bannerlord from "no/bad review" to "good review" is the missing Warband features, the announced rebellions, dynasty mechanics, crime mechanics, mod tools, and polishing/balancing/adding a bit of depth to what already exists. That would make it into a truly good sequel.