I mostly agree with mor dan, and I think the examples of Inquisitors and Assassins perfectly illustrate the problems inherent in taking your developmental lead from gaming geeks who live on the internet.

I don't think either assassins or inquisitors are in any way broken, I think they are exactly how they are meant to be and work in an effective and (more importantly) balanced fashion. With a bit of forethought, I have dodged most of the Inquisitors in my games, and when I have been caught out by them it's just another factor to deal with. Issues of historical accuracy aside, just because they burnt my favourite general doesn't mean the game is broken.

As for assassins, I think they are perfect. Really hard to train up, but if you get the guilds going and concentrate on assassination and subterfuge over blunt warfare, then you can easily have four or five maxed out assassins running about the map (I have on vh with Milan). If it was easy to off opposing generals and characters the game would become farcical.

Even given that both these parts of the game are (imho) balanced, there is still a huge outcry in places like this for them to be recognised as a bug/flaw and for them to be changed in a patch. It's an easy cop out to say the game is broken just because there's an aspect of it that is difficult to deal with or not exactly the way you want it. After all, this is still just the vanilla setting, and I'm sure people can tweak the balance of the game how they want when they get modding.