imo opinion the game mainline infatry small arms fight where in better place:
1) Grenadiers where about the same level and they where being used. Now as far as I can tell G43, 5 men grenadiers, ST, osttruppen have replaced vanilla Grenadier which see far less action.
2) Conscripts have been replaced by Penals although they where buffed and they will probably be buffed again
3) VG are regularly used and are considered OP by many as far as I can tell
4) Riflemen are consider UP and have been replaced by other infatry
5)Bolster IS are considered OP and will probably have to be nerfed
Fight where about better positioning while now with weapons that are good at all ranges things imo have become more about brute force.
The definition:
benchmark a standard or point of reference against which things may be compared.
So there can be only one.
If understand correctly and you are using each faction mainline infatry as benchmark then you are not actually balancing faction vs faction but each faction separately and that can easily prove problematic. Any imbalance between mainline infantries is transfer and multiplied to other infatry.
Imply that using a single benchmark force units to of the same power level and that how the perform relatively to each other is simply false. That simply was not the case when Relic did the balancing.
On the contrary each mainline infatry was balanced vs other mainlines infantries and for a range that the traded more favorably was chosen. Was it perfect? no. But thing are perfect even now after so many patches and after so much homogenization that simply things.
This is my opinion but I don't think you will agree to it. We simply have to agree to disagree.
On 1: youre straight up saying an increased variety of mainline units for ostheer is a bad thing...
2 and 5 are simple enough.
3 and 4...im not usually this blunt about things that arent statistics and factually verifiable, but people are straight up wrong about these two. People see themselves losing to volks and dont realize volks arent actually the problem and are not OP (okws starting manpower is). People think riflemen suck because they dont do well against okw flooding the field early. Again, not a riflemen problem and riflemen arent UP.
As for your definition, I dont see how you could possibly interpret that as implying there can only be one benchmark for something. You can have multiple points of reference. You can have multiple points of comparison.
And about agreeing to disagree, sure, that makes sense. But the reason I was even so confrontational is because people HAVE disagreed... a lot. Basically every time youve brought it up. It gets tiring seeing someone spam threads with their opinion, try to argue that a line of design that doesnt agree with this personal preference is wrong, and then have you do a "lets just agree to disagree." If you truly believed it best to agree to disagree and not pursue the issue further, then you wouldnt bring this up every time you saw a design perspective that didnt match the way you would prefer the game to be designed.