Quark: Instead of powerfull France, England and HRE you now have powerful Italians, Aragon and Ireland... I take first three anytime, because they provide more fun with their late units. But with current configuraition,those three factions most of time are killed off, or reduced to 1-3 provinces at best before even reaching Black Death... and at that time Italians have half of central europe... THIS is happening to me every game I play. Since last month (when i started to play M2TW again) same situation repeats over and over again... with small differences if I choose one of those nations... But AI plays terrible as France, HRE or England... (and same is true for Otomans...) I call it bad balance.
What is causing it? Answer is probably hard, we can say money script need tweaking, but i'm not sure about it - In my last campaign I altered King Purse for all factions and I gave KP 1000 to Italians and 6000-8000 to HRE and France. After 100 turns, half of France is occupied by Ireland and Venice, HRE is almost killed off by Sicilly, and England is gone because of Scottland and Ireland... (Their end came after they conguered Edinburg and William Wallace emerged...)
SO, It isnt caused by money....
What is causing it then? It is unit composition. All those powerhorse factions have some superunits that are wining against HRE,France, England, even if Player finds them weak. Problem is autocalc works differently than battle against AI... So Italians are always able to beat France easilly and they dont have any chance, even if they have more money.
For me its going to the point where this game is not providing enough of fun as it is too repetitious. Sometimes smaller scope of game is better than megalomaniac huge campaign with every faction possible. Unit slots are limited, we can't add enough units for every faction, removing some factions is necessary - It will allow to add new units that will balance game more - more Early Era units, so Early Era is not so cheap for example...
And regarding Templars, if they will be available to any faction that will conquer Jerusalem, instead of own faction, it will just add more fun - It will make you crusade more. Right now crusades are just a shadow of what they were intended to in vanila.