I think some of this ennui might actually be exposing the tiredness of the current TW engine. Strip away the fancy, glitzy abilities and mad fantasy over the top trappings, and the core gameplay is somewhat…well, boring.
I felt this a bit with the original TW Rome 2, although mods helped. Attila was interesting for a while but didn’t grab me.
I’m thinking they need to rework how units fight, as in model mass etc a bit better, strip away some of these fancy clickable abilities, slow the battles down a bit.
Thing is, maybe any era will be boring after the bombastic silliness of Warhammer.