You must be reading a different forum than me. The dev team's answer to the troops morale problem was: "Too bad for you, fight closer to home." You'll notice that no code change was made in response.
Sorry if I say something that was already mentioned, as I didn't really read the entire post and I am quoting you just because it is the last useful line I could find.
Without going into the details of whether the distance based penalties are rightly tuned, I just believe either there was a bug before which was fixed or there is some sort of bug now. Or if not a bug there was a tweak in the code which calculates the morale problems depending on the distance.
Some months ago (I would say around 3-4) I travelled on dwilight with my Morekian char up to Vakreno Heaps with a 60men mercenary unit without any morale trouble, at all. Now, as soon as I landed in Chesland with another 60men mercenary unit I immediately started to get reports of heavy morale problems, around a 30% loss each turn. I would guess Chesland-Morek and Vakreno Heaps-Morek is roughly the same distance, and actually 3-4 months ago Morek didn't really go all the way down to Shyussei so it was even farer.
I believe what one should reflect on is that before sea travel to get to Vakreno Heaps from Morek it was painfully long, can't say exactly but easily more than a week of travel. Now, with sea travel, it's a matter of some days. Was this perhaps the ratio behind tweaking the morale/distance code?