Econ, very cool work... it must take a lot of painstaking attention. Everyone here thanks you for the time spent on it!

One factor not being mentioned is, the quality of troops in a given space. Your 90 bow samurai only take 75% of the space of bow ashigaru on castle walls, or in your formation on the open field. IF all things were equal, this means they're 33% more effective, at least in one sense of the word. Then we can add Econ's findings on top of that, and they really start to look good. After all, why would the designers make smaller units (in terms of people) cost more?

As a bit of an aside, and contrary to what I said above, my impression is that bow warrior monks are not worth it (bow samurai are the happy medium), but naginata warrior monks ARE worth it, relative to spear samurai or ashigaru.