Having said that, I will require a great deal of patching before I can consider purchasing NTW. CA, if you are reading, more then the current figleaf of support for ETW is required.
The focus for the update has been AI, both campaign and battle along with improvements to sieges and the naval rebalancing. A lot of work has been put into the campaign and diplomacy AI, focusing on how it wages war, makes alliances and peace as well as use of naval invasions. Battle side improvements have been made to most areas of the AI with the focus on the siege AI which has had major changes made to it. Sieges have also had a lot of work done on them with a lot of bugs fixed, improvements made to pathfinding and how guns and troops on walls work.
It seems to me they are doing a great deal of work. Give them time, they're trying to sort things out. I think that sooner or later they're going to end up with some competition and therefore start trying to fix all these things.