EB's goals are much the same as RTR's: basically, making the game more realistic. It started out dedicated to researching barbarians, hence the name, but it quickly grew into a general historical research team, and upon the game's release, a historical mod team. For more info, go to the forums linked above.

Anyway, most barbarians really weren't as barbaric as they're often portrayed. None of them matched the discipline of "civilized" armies, but then, arguably nobody did again after the fall of the Empire until the mid-medieval times. Barbarians also didn't match civilized architectual achievements, and their societies generally had less bureaucracy and the like, and they usually read and wrote a lot less; but their metalworking was certainly just as good, their educational system was often as good, etc., and they weren't stupid or anything.

-Simetrical