Smithy: 10% per week means you can't use it as a substitute for going to a city but you can use it as a FREE way to repair some equipment damage. Though perhaps instead it could just be restricted to being 5% damage repaired and only able to be used once per day instead.
--If you want it to be 5% daily, it has to be automatic. So as long as you have your unit in your region, they should automatically repair equipment. Otherwise it will be better to just pay gold to fix equipment. You are underestimating the value of time in this game. It is a turn based game and when your general orders you to refit, you can't really go back to your region and sit there to save few gold when you can just ask any council to send you gold to get your equipment fixed. This feels like a feature for peace time at most.
Chapel: Sure, keeping morale high is easy. But this is basically the equivalent of a free entertainment option and building a chapel should be quite cheap. So if players really want to build one (and a chapel is the kind of building you'd expect to have on an estate) then they'd be able to do so - equally, if they think it's a waste of money then they don't have to build one. That being said though, perhaps it might be better to have the Chapel give a smaller morale boost but also give a cohesion boost, that might be more useful.
--Wouldn't mind Chapel raising cohesion but the morale part is useless.
Training Ground: Let's say it costs 120 gold to build a training ground on your estate. That's a lot compared to the cost of a few training sessions at the academy. So the only way you'd be able to both build this and get the benefit of it is if you've got plenty of time to sit around on your estate training. And, let's be honest, how often exactly do nobles have the free time to just go back to their estates and spend weeks there? Not very often at all and never in wartime. So it's nonsense to say this would basically mean that every char started off with 40% ability. Besides, how could chars bully others just because they've got a higher skill level? It's not like you're OBLIGED to accept duel challenges or anything...
--Hope training ground also slowly trains your men and raise their training. As for 120 gold for 40%, no it is incredibly cheap compare to the amount of gold you need to spend to get both swordfighting and jousting up to 40%. It costs you 16 gold per day for more than 10 days. Hack you probably need to spend at least a month raising your skill to reach 40% for both skills. That is 960 gold if you spend a month training swordfighting + jousting with a normal tutor for a month straight.
Mill/Workshop: If efficiency never got implemented then I'd aim to implement it as part of this feature. The alternative is to go back to the idea of this improvement giving a tax income boost of X gold per week.
--Hopefully this will allow some poor knights to produce more gold by going over 100% efficiency. Maybe later on we can add something like 'manage estate' to increase the efficiency even further by being in your region working on your estate. I think efficiency has a lot of potential.
Guardhouse: How is it useless exactly? It'd mean a big saving in unit costs (even 25 gold per week is a significant difference for the average knight) and I'm not sure why you seem to think that people would only want to hang around in cities if they've got time to spare...
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--Don't know about you but I never cared about gold to be honest. If you lack gold, you simply need to ask for more. This game doesn't give people enough gold to be self-sufficient. Gold is funneled to the top so you always need to ask for gold. Thought the current system was supposed to solve this problem we had with the old system but it failed miserably. Maybe because the system is incomplete but I also think it was just poorly thought out from the designing phase. Maybe the taxation system isn't the thing that is broken. Maybe it is region stats which were arbitrary decided by Tom.
