Hi KAM, I tried your first 1.1 version in few battles in my HATG campaign and I feel quite comfortable with it. I'm really having a good time with my battles now (got back to DeI after a very long time, due to the forced upgrade to EE, that broke my personal reworked version of CAC).
Unfortunately I cannot give you a detailed feedback on average battle durations, as I couldn't help to tweak morale tables (not units stats, just the kv_morale file...) in order to meet my personal taste, lowering a bit the general tendency to rout (moreover, I play with 41 units per army and increased a lot the number of armies per faction)...
I'm very impressed by the last version of DeI, I really appreciate the general balance, and the recruiting scripts (I mainly play with Romans and I'm used to have half of my armies made by Italic allied units, and DeI looks like the perfect system to field 41 units to represent a Roman Legion with an embedded "Ala Sociorum"), yet I'm looking forward to the brand new system in v1.0 with much anticipation, as your description of it looks very interesting to me and I think it could meet my personal taste even more than the present version.
Thanks so much for your precious work!
Cheers!