I saw another player make a similar post in the forum with a similar theme, but it didn't really touch on the specifics I had in mind so here goes. I think it is a very good idea to get rid of the landlord/builder knights as they were underused, and this allows us to focus more on the more interesting knights. That being said, in KoH 1, once your kingdom got to a certain size, you are no longer playing KoH, you're playing Kingdom Micromanager 2004. Using my merchants efficiently(switching who I'm trading with or starting new trade agreements with now prosperous nations), or spies creatively(checking which kingdom didn't have an heir, and would likely destabilize of their king was assassinated) wasn't possible, as the vast majority of my time was spent micromanaging my marshals on the warfronts, adopting populations, and converting. For this reason, I have always wanted an option in the game where my marshals could act independently. Naturally the player would decide what they would be limited to (can they pillage or not, should they siege or not, can they leave the nations borders or just hunt rebels, etc...) I was worried this would be a big ask, but then I considered the fact that we already have AI for the enemy nations, and every king has a different temperament which determines how they will use their marshals, so hopefully this is already implemented into the game to some degree and wouldn't require too much work. That being said, I believe that this small improvement to the game would improve the player experience drastically. I wasn't going to make this post as I've never written on any gaming forum, but this is the only game that's stayed consistently good over the past decade and a half, and I hope the development team considers adding this feature.
P.S. If the developers were able to add this feature, it would be great if they could expand on the pillage/no pillage option. Example: Marshal can pillage, but not/only farms/villages/monastery/etc. This way you could have your marshal to have specific strategies such as burning down all of the farmland, making it harder for the province to hire new soldiers, allowing for an easier assault on the city. It wouldn't add much complication to the game, but would give it much more depth.
P.P.S. When choosing where to send a knight, in KoH the list of possible provinces was sorted by oldest to newest, meaning you had to scroll all the way down every time you sent a priest to convert/adopt a newly conquered province (which was the only time I ever sent a knight to a province). Please sort them from newest to oldest. It's a small quality of life improvement, but it was always so annoying when expanding.