To answer your two questions:
There won't be a better army compositions/AI recruitment mod included (but there are a good number of them on the workshop, and they should be compatible). At least there won't be for the release, I might add something like that later, but no promises. Focus is heavily on the actual battle mechanics, although I can appreciate this request since it adds some good flavor.
To answer your second question, the battles are longer in some regards and shorter in others compared to vanilla. The missile balance is entirely different, so it's not going to be wortwhile spending arrows trying to take out heavily armoured units from the front, whereas lighter units will be far more vulnerable and shouldn't be left exposed to projectiles. The melee combat is pretty close to the pace in Medieval II, and the morale works in a similar manner where units often don't need to take many casualties to rout, but will return to the battle very frequently. So the combat pace isn't very similar to EB, although I'd be happy to release an extra version with slower pace for those that are interested.
The news I was talking about will come a bit later today. Without revealing too much, it's going to concern hoplites, and there will also be some information about the current progress of the mod and more in depth of some of the features.