Because they had those internal discussions years ago as Mexxico pointed out and decided to streamline the game instead of going into a bolder direction, maybe it was aiming for those sweet console sales or just wanting to make the game more "accessible" to attract a larger audience no matter the platform, similar to the way Bethesda went with the Elder Scrolls series with each newer game being more dumbed down than the last but they sell amazingly well because of the shinny improved graphics while the rest of the game suffers.idk why you find those disheartening. kingdoms go to war when they're strong, their enemies are weak and think they can win the war. the "border incidents" are just the declared reason to gather support. just like the weapons of mass destructions, "spreading freedom" or "fighting terrorism".
they're just cutting the BS.
village building needs to be brought back though.
multiplayer stuff can be easily solved with private servers.
the game is still being developed. dialogues will be written and will get fleshed out. warband's missing features are simple so they're easy to add. but they nees to finish the basic game (all AIs, performance, balance, scenes, equipment, etc) before that.
I enjoyed Daggerfall and Morrowind in vanilla, Oblivion i used maybe a dozen or so mods to improve areas i found lacking in the game, Skyrim i have 412 mods installed (just counted) to make it truly enjoyable to me like the ones before it (most of them are balancing or adding places/features mentioned in lore but absent in-game)
And about those features you just said yourself why i found them disheartening, it's too simplified from what it could be and yeah many features from warband were simple or barebones but they were there in vanilla and mods could build upon them, in bannerlord i hoped we would get basically an warband 2 in how warband took everything from classic, added some cool new features and improved graphics, combat and map.
Bannerlord is a good game but it's lacking in many fronts and far from what it could really become, i had high hopes during the start of the EA but it's being developed so slow and cautiously, they don't dare to add anything truly grand beyond bugfixes and small features here and there.