1. Sure, but they're far more destructive than they used to be. Just look at the regions near Coria that have seen the most battle and you'll see regions that have lost 6000 peasants out of an 8000 total. That's just the effects of normal, prolonged war these days and recovery of those regions will take months.
2. Yes, the game was more a game back then and less the cumbersome social simulator it has become. Many of the things you listed there are things the realism craze has brought on and made the game less fun, less dynamic, slower and all around a worse experience.
3. Perhaps so, but when the prevailing tactic in the game boils down to killing the enemy regions for months to come, there's something extremely wrong with the way the game works. Waiting for the peasants to return to a region is like watching paint dry. It's not fun in any way and should not be an element of the game that lasts months at a time.
Making regions recover faster won't bring back the old style of play, it'll just make wars meaningless.
