Every once in a while I'll spec into cav, but I definitely consider myself an infantry player (when I actually play this game anymore).
That being said, the changes to cav went way, way overboard. It's like you came across a dirty window and your solution to fix it was hit it with a sledgehammer.
Originally, this was a game about choice and fun. Now it just keeps getting diluted down and the variety of builds just keeps getting reduced. I never thought cav was a problem. The one thing that cav is REALLY good at, is killing idiots and rambos who charge in without paying attention. Cav is pretty easy to avoid or kill if they're coming at you. A lot of people in this thread complaining that armored horses were OP seem to have no idea how to combat cav. They complain that once they stop the cav, hitting it with their tiny, no-speed-bonus weapon takes a million hits to kill it. Well, it is an armored horse. Why not, I dunno hit the rider instead? You know, the guy with less armor & hp? Or, when the horse is running at you, hit it in the legs which will 1-shot a hell of a lot of horses.
Adjusting armor, hp values or even difficulty by a point or two is totally reasonable. Changing the difficulty by 3(!) skill points is not. Especially since you need 9(!) attribute points to make up that difference. I think the 3 point attribute reset just adds insult to injury.
All this patch really does is dramatically reduce the amount of heavy cav on the field, which is a real shame. There goes even more variety. So what if it was easy for heavy cav to kill idiots? That person's 10:1 kdr doesn't mean a damn thing to me. The reduction of variety, viable builds & the unending grind just makes me play this game less and less. I miss the good 'ole days. Sure it was unbalanced as fuck, but my god was it fun.