RTR is a very, very good improvement of RTW, with lots of action and well balanced, decent gameplay.

EB is a very, very good game, using the RTW engine
I see the issue of RTR vs EB thusly...

What RTR tries to do is it attempts to make RTW as historically accurate as possible, but with a focus on keeping the gameplay as balanced as possible and retaining the 'spirit' of what Creative Assembly were originally attempting to accomplish when they made the game...

EB, on the other hand, says 'screw it' and rebuilds the game almost entirely from the ground up and puts historical accuracy first, balanced gameplay second...

That's the thing really, as you said, EB and RTR attempt to accompish different things... That's the long and short of it... And indeed, if this guy is so obsessed with having more powerful cavalry charges and RTR apparantly has that, he should probably play RTR instead...

EB is not the average game you buy in the streets, EB's focus is NOT on entertainment, but rather EDUCATION. thats where the term EDUTAINMENT comes in.
The way I see it, if I were to picture EB as a meal, I would see the primary entertainment value of the mod as being the meat and potatoes, with any other vegitables on the plate representing how the drive for historical accuracy crosses over into the gameplay and actually serves to make the gameplay better... This comes in several forms including how units behave and look on the battlefield, unit availability and cost on the campaign map, the campaign map itself and, of course, the new mechanics behind generals and the traits and ancillaries they acquire...

The, what I would call 'extraneous' historical infomation (like the historical context you get when you right click on a unit or building for more infomation) that does not directly affect the gameplay is (I think) appropriately represented by a drink of some sort (wine possibly) to go along with the meal... You could eat the meal without the drink (I.E. You could play the game without reading any of the histroy), but taking the drink as well helps round out the meal and almost certainly serves to make it a more pleasureable experience... You don't want to drink the wine at the expense of the meal though, or else the meal will languish and get cold while you chug down the wine and become drunk... What that means is that you don't want to find yourself having done nothing for an hour or hours because you were reading through pages and pages worth of historical infomation... This is, after all, a game, not a textbook...

In the context of the meal, you're far better off taking an occasional sip from the wine glass as you eat... That is, for example, only reading up on the histories of particular units and buildings as you become curious about them (such as when I first encountered a unit of Elite African Pikemen when I attacked Carthage)... This is what I do anyway (your method may be different though, but it's fine as long as you don't suspend actually playing the game just for the sake of reading the history)... I also don't make it my buisness to read through every 'the year in history' 'cover to cover' as it were (rather I just skim through them and get the main points)...

That's just how I view it anyway...

Anyway, I'd just like to see if we can adress something else Arkanin said but no one has responded to... that being his view that Rorarii are unbalanced... What do you think about this? I've personally found them to be a fantastic and highly versatile light unit, just the thing for bogging down enemy cavalry and/or out flanking the enemy... I've also found they make a fantastic garrison unit, being fairly cheap, having large numbers and being strong enough to deal with brigands and the occasional small enemy force that slips by my main legions... I'm personally not sure if being versatile necessarily makes them unbalanced, but what do you think? Does Arkanin's statement regarding Rorarii have merit?