As I said - the natural counters of the class (but also, of all mounted ranged classes) got weaker during time. Look up forum posts two years ago, HX, with same stats as now, was a joke/gimmick class which few people bothered to play. You had to be a masochist to pick it over a horse archer, and foot archers would reliably oneshot any 7 str build, with great accuracy. Many infantrymen had throwing weapons too, so riding up close to infantry was largely a bad idea.
All these counters got systematically nerfed so infantry would have an easier time, and we have the situation where the HX is a better class then the HA (tried a few days ago to make a STF HA - it works, but not nearly as well as a HX). That said, if the HX gets nerfed without any other changes, people will make HA STF chars to troll. Because once foot ranged is eliminated / there is too few foot ranged, they can ride around infantry at will, and whether they do 60p or 40p matters very little in the grand scheme of things.
The effect is especially nasty if they are people which can afford to just ignore upkeep for a while (turns out upkeep doesn't work so well) and ride on destriers+, making it incredibly hard to actually down them. That said, all cavalry riding on destriers+ is very hard to down, but at least infantry can prevent melee cavalry from attacking, even if they can't counter them so well anymore.
I'm against deleting the HX class, but it will have to take some sort of nerf eventually. I think downgrading to hunting crossbows and higher str reqs would be enough.
