Whacker: Yes, in fact I was already wondering if I should buy M2TW but decided to give CA another chance (and give CA: OZ a first chance). With Kingdoms I was a lot more hesitant, and as a result I don't have it yet.
Somewhere in between I realized that CA officially decided to be a "big bad mean company" on the lines of Microsoft

We shall see... I for one am not at all optimistic about CA. It already sounds like it's going to be another rushed game with glaring bugs that were not anticipated and caught the guys totally unawares

I don't agree that this approach is the natural state of things though. Looking at companies like Blizzard (who incidentally don't have an external publisher iirc), reputation today is a hard currency. If CA suddenly find themselves bereft of any modding community, or community in general, to speak of, they will definitely perceive a drop in expansion sales for ETW. Casual gamers will be their answer to such a thing, so I do hope that we'll get some competition like some other posters here, because casual gamers probably won't buy two games of the same type.