Talk to me again about voluntary ignorance.
Watch the post patch archers. Or the good ones, regardless of the patch. Archers do get kills, and all ranged are able to chose their targets much more freely than melee or cav. This enables archers to focus on critical targets, making the average archer kill much more valuable than a melee kill.
Next you'll be saying that bows do the same damage in a battle as swords or lances.
No, in fact they do more, because all archers use armor piercing arrows. Swords maybe seem to do a lot of damage to you, that's because clever inf with cut weapons will attack the light armored enemy. As an archer you can 2 shot the big fat str crutch with his plate armor from range.
The validity of archers in battle rellies a lot on teamplay,
No they don't. They get in trouble, they run away. You don't need anybody when you can just run away from what could kill you. If by teamplay you mean outnumbering then it's more or less true given that a melee team only has chances against a group of archers when they have enough people to sacrifice when trying to reach the running bastards. No melee class can take out archers without this numerical advantage.
which is what actually matters, and you rarely see that.
Actually, "teamplay" as any ranged class is much much easier to do than with inf or cav. Shoot the baddies, if they attack flee in different direction = guaranteed crossfire.
From the moment an archer has to relly on himself against any other class, he's usualy screwed.
If by screwed you mean he has to run to maintain his invulnerability to any class but other archers and xbowmen, then yes.
Slower arrows are unfair, since our short range performance is crap, and getting crappier.
L2FPS. There's no aiming sway in warband. If someone comes close enough to you, the game literally becames a point and click. You can turn at any speed you want. As long as you release your shot when the guy is in front of you, you hit him and probably kill him with the huge damage bows do at close range.
