Well all I know is that going by pure stats, dis. noble knights should beat dis. chivalric knights (I'm assuming that defense value is subtracted from attack value, and that armor piercing reduces the defense value from armor by half). But this is obviously not the case if you do a custom battle with these units. I could see the slower 2 handed animations being a "feature", after all, you would think it would take longer to swing a huge battle ax than a short sword. However, the fact that this disadvantage is mentioned no where in the game, not to mentioned it makes these units weaker than their tech level and costs would indicate they should be, leads me to believe its not fully intentional on the part of the game designers.