I am not sure you are? It is possible to make nothing but women and champs. If you work out a good build order for that, it might even be quite strong, since you only really need 40 champs to win against a full cs army (130 units). There is not much more the game can do to make them feel that way, though. I mean, if you choose to use them as your only army, you can (and many do, I agree with you on that), but its not a very good idea, since they are a lot weaker than champs. I mean, I can choose to only make villagers in AoE and use them as my army, the game doesnt "prohibit" that, but i will lose. likely, if your enemy makes champs and you dont, you will lose.

Meh I think it can be done pretty nicely with good impacts on how the game is played. So it’s certainly worth trying out. When I get an SSD and time, I’ll set up something in a com mod version. I'm sure it will have balancing consequences.

we are working on that in historical too.  Maybe share on server how some of the civs practice it differently?

Implementing a feature based on slavery could make a lot of differences. Firstly, it would be much more realistic and historical. Secondly, it would bring more differences between civilisations because they didn't practice slavery in the same way. Thirdly, slaves could be much more efficient at harvesting resources. The citizen soldier would therefore be more versatile and more defensive.

Change is not inherently bad. It's just bad execution. There is clearly room for improvement in the implementation of territory and capture features. Changing the default is understandable.

While I'm in the minority that believes the change was good, attacking buildings without siege or a good number of elephants is currently a waste of time (in vanilla version, not Community mod).

Age of Empires has always had many excellent mods. The only constraint is that the definitive edition now receives numerous updates, which discourages modders.