Cavalry can have a big problem with loose formations even in RTW - you can see it in realism mods like RTR and EB, when heavy cavalry charge skirmishers in loose order. They often suffer awfully.

Apparently it's worse in M2TW. In RTW, the problem seemed to be specific to skirmishers - skirmishers trying to avoid cavalry by their skirmish ability switched the cavalry from charging to purusing and cost them their charge bonus. I never heard anyone recommend meeting a RTW cavalry charge in loose formation.

For M2TW, I agree it needs to be fixed (as do spears, IMO). But CA bashing won't make that any more likely (in fact, I suspect it will make it less likely, as CA staff will just switch off from a thread with abusive posts), so people should take care to discuss this maturely and not with insulting language.

At the moment, I will just try to ignore this bug. I could not bear to use a two row deep loose formation of spearmen to fight AI knights. Thankfully the AI plays in an equally naive manner.