Just how much replayability and lasting fun is there in native M&B?
Exactly, out of my 800 hours of Warband, probably less than 20 hours worth of those were spent on Native, which was mainly the multiplayer. Not everyone is going to love the vanilla games, I don't personally 'love' the vanilla Morrowind and Oblivion, but once I modded them I did love them, I don't see the issue here. I love the modding scene for games, being able to make the changes you want rather than developers forcing them upon you, how is that a bad thing?.
I know I would rather the developers work on the big features and aspects of the game to deliver a solid product, so we can add our own small changes later on, which takes a few minutes at most to add something as trivial as needing food and water to survive.
It surely is going to be a good game, but the combat system looks like its still the same as oblivion; slice n dice. And also fast travel is still in the game which kinda ruins it alittle for me.
I'm repeating myself a bit now, but again, there will no doubt be a mod released on day 1 or 2 to remove the fast travel from the game for you, you can also probably just do it yourself through configs. This is why I truly love the Elder Scrolls games of this era. I myself like to keep fast travel, I wont use it unless I find I have to go back and forth to the same places too often, which does get boring when there isn't much to do along the way.