It seems like you are trying to make a situation where a knight with 10% and the lord with 20% makes the lord more money than just taking 30% for himself. But this makes no sense if all you do is divide the land. If you want to make estates and stuff a big part of the game you have to make regions deteriorate without knights. However, if you make sheer numbers of nobles have significant enough benefits that lords actually care about them, then, as we saw in the policing/production estate system, drops in population are ruinous. If you don't want to make estates a big part of the game, then you have to go back to full realm communism.
I don't think middle of the road systems can work very well at all. In the current system, the lord hands out largesse unilaterally and receives only lip service in turn.
The root of the issue is that systems which give large production bonuses for knights result in a large value purely for character numbers, whereas in the battle part of the game, a single character can command a widely varying amount of force depending mostly on gold. Two characters with 20 men each are given only a small bonus compared to 1 commanding 40. The estate system has to follow suit and therefore lords are given almost unilateral power. Therefore, the gold producing and gold destroying parts of the game are contradictory.
I have always supported the return of communism. Without gold the number of fun decisions in the game, especially for new players, is very small. Making the gold supply dependent on a few guys who have open estates who may all be giant dicks has been terrible.
