I hope you don't mind me weighing in to talk about what I think to a post that might be a bit too old for you to feel like talking about lol. It has been a few months after all...
In my opinion, among many others, this is the worst offender: The encyclopedia. The encyclopedia makes this game dull. When you make an RPG, a roleplaying game, it's important you make a world where a role can be effectively played, that means that every decision you take to give a player information, counts on how immersed will the player be while taking that role. Imagine if Skyrim started and the first thing it told you was that you were the dragonborn, right from the go, through a line of text in the menu and when you press "Tab" it gives you all the information of every character in the game? Sure you can play the game anyways, but you are being robbed of the mistery of knowing people, discovering a world, and to effectively, playing a role, a huntsman build wouldn't be an omnipresent being.
I disagree about the (formerly useful) Encyclopedia being detrimental to the game for several reasons; first and foremost, this is not an RPG, definitely not a game that can be compared to Skyrim since they play about as much like M&B as it does with the Sims; there may be a few faint similarities and overlap here and there, but nobody would ever mistake them for one another due to the numerous differences. I've noticed that "what even is Mount and Blade?" is a disputed question since it doesn't easily fit into most established genres, but I've always consider Mount and Blade a tactics-focused strategy game since I first played Warband when it was new on PS4. Therefore, when analyzing and appraising these games, I've always done so from how they play out as tactical and strategic games.
As for how that relates to the Encyclopedia, I'd say the relation is that many strategy game, perhaps even most of them, have something similar that tells you at least some basic information on all the cities, castles, officers/characters/NPCs, and other information particular to those games. However, different strategy games DO impose a level of obscurity to this information and thus require you to use Spies (or something similar) to gather information. I do think Bannerlord could benefit from a system like this, although the current implementation is very poor and contrary to what it ought to be doing, since I have enjoyed strategy games where you have to send out spies in order to stay up-to-date with Encyclopeida-like information such as city stats, officer loyalty, food/money/troop numbers, etc. and it'd be good for Bannerlord if the player could work with spies to gather this type of information (and, very relevantly, broad location of non-allied units/characters). I wouldn't obscure character appearances, family relations, or ages since these things do nothing more than annoy players in practice and the way the Fog of War system was implemented has not been made compatible with pre-existing systems (such as marriage arrangements), never mind reloading existing game saves only to discover everybody you know is considered a stranger in the Encyclopedia.
In Bannerlord, you're forced to be an omnipresent being, because the encyclopedia is the main, and only source of information for the player. That means that now making relationships with lords is completely useless. Making a conversation system where you HAD to get to know lords, to know their attitudes? No, press one button in the encyclopedia and you now know. Getting to know people in the game doesn't exists, because you don't need to. In Warband, the only way you had was to make quests for them or to plot against other lords they didn't like. It was a rudimentary system that needed improvement, but instead Bannerlord throws an interesting but flawed system out of the window and just says "eh here it is, press a button, this lord is... Devious".
The Encyclopedia in Warband was extremely transparent--the only thing you didn't know was a character's personality like in Bannerlord. The only bit of information I can think of that was obscured and required investigation was current (approximate) locations of other characters, but even that was merely streamlined in Bannerlord since it updates every time you enter a city (maybe other places to, or talking to nobles?). I would argue, related to what I said above, that personality would be better hidden until you actually got to interact with a character since this sort of thing isn't usually transparent outside reputation (if a character is even famous enough to have a real reputation) and knowing a character's personality and whereabouts is strategically useful and thus something spies ought to keep you up to date on.
Let's imagine a little bit here: What if skill points, like charisma, or roguery (either ours or our companions') allowed us to unlock Lords' traits, that would mean you need to get resourceful to get information, and its not just magically thrown into you. Maybe, knowing the location of every lord withouth asking could be a spymaster perk, because you get information from anywhere and you just know things, but nope, you just know everything the second you set foot in a town.
I would not like this information to be perk-based--it ought to organically come from in-game sources. An anti-social recluse could reasonably be up to date on world events and other people if they know a guy who runs a network on their behalf after all.
The next thread is Influence, but I think I'll just write on it in the comments when I feel like it. Sometimes writing about Bannerlord I get frustrated halfway through, because is completely useless to think of this game or to suggest anything at all since devs don't care about it.
I understand your frustration even though I both disagree with you on the developers caring about it (at the
very least, the sustainability of their jobs depends on it) and the general pessimism with the game--I view it as one of the greats already, though marred with bugs and released officially way too quickly. Even if they halted development now, I'd still it a great game since I've enjoyed plenty of games with horrible glitches, bugs, and unfinished/half-baked mechanics although it would be deeply shameful for the developers since it would mean they not only abandoned something that could have been greater but they also knowingly left it in a state that should, at the very least, be cleaned up.
It's a perfectly fine game as it is now, though sometimes illogical, stupid, and unfinished in places, but the game absolutely most be cleaned up on a technical level since I'd rather have a "tight" game that doesn't have dirty banners, women who can't wear women's clothes without clipping issues (glad that's fixed), endemic save corruption issues (glad that's fixed), crashes (hope that's fixed lol), and more issues than a game that has a breadth of smart mechanics and sophistication but is ugly as hell from distorted textures and can't even operate for longer than an hour without corrupting and forcing you out of the game lol (of course it's not THAT bad, but a lot of players have had dozens of hours wasted due to corruption and the banner/shield texture issues are outright offensive to me lol).