Wrt militia program, considering 1200 gold(2400 total) is a massive resource float simply seems non viable, considering the incredibly poor ROI, when you're getting pseudo trash units (it's well above the gold cost of the units involved) when gold is by far the most important resource at that stage.
Shire levy is terrible as well at 120 Res per unit, with 60 gold a pop for yeomen.(50% higher than xbows, nevermind archers)
These kinds of irrational changes, along with stuff like nerfing Goku mounted samurai (that are actually generic knights, and the issue is everything else that buffs them), or how long they took to tackle the very obvious issues with things like manor cost efficiency, healer elephants, torguud cost efficiency, and lately amir cheese.
I will never stop wondering why such seemingly foolish changes are implemented, or why such obvious changes aren't. Does the dev team have a cat that randomly blats a table and some balance is implemented based on that?
Ottomans have the potential for 1000 golds worth of units for free, and that's arguably one of their best aspects, I don't see how Devs are ever going to balance this 30 unit army dump. It's likely going to become another 1st crusade from aoe2 (either non viable or toxic to play against)
I'm convinced the cat is entirely in charge of HRE balancing.