I respect your opinion and I must admit that you drive some very strong points here and you have most certainly put a lot of thought into that.
I agree about the score balancing. However, being a hardcore player, I cannot dismiss the people who like to play the game casually or make any disparaging remarks concerning them because of that. However, look at the score sheet in the game. If there were no heroes in it, that would be fine. But what if a player who tries really hard to beat the game in normal simply doesn't get in the chart because of the reload penalty? How will that person feel in the end of a game that challenged him a lot - just to find he did it for nothing and can't even show what he/she did?
I would personally feel fine if there is the option to select my army alignment in the first few areas. That will let me try out various army setups and tactics without me having to complete like 33%, 66% or 99% of the game for the same result. That would be a serious loss of real time. Even now, with the present state of affairs, it takes a couple of hours to do the kiting properly.
Well, I am positive that there will always be such arguments because people feel different. I also felt different for a while while I was playing the russian version, but I simply adapted

Since nothing has changed in 6 months, keeping in mind we got a few patches for that time, I would not presume that a major change will happen at all.
Let us not forget that the game is pretty much open source and there will be mods to make it harder or easier, then everyone can play it the way he/she feels that it fulfills his/her needs as much as possible.