Actually, I don't quite understand your attachment to wastelands idea with flesh and fishmen. That's stupid. I met the game week ago and after that I found Version 13. It is the best and you should return to it.
I am very fond of idea with enthralled noble making their way to create dark empire or make dark cult, or dark emperor cult and whatever, I think your early versions of the game are very close to that, the only problem was with that nobles actually couldn't do much and player(god) was the only force there.
So now even the vassal system was removed/wasn't added. What the reason? What the main idea of the game?
Sorry, my comment can be demotivating.
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I assure you, I'm not easily discouraged.
As mentioned in the devLog, the game still focuses primarly on the "dark empire" side of things, revolving around politics and suchlike. The ideal is for the systems in that approach to be sufficiently complex that you can remove half of them and play exclusively from the "outside", manipulating foreign empires without the enthralled being present in them. As such, any improvements to the Fishmen and Flesh side of the game will mean improvements to the "classic" form of the game, with the enthralled playing politics.
Nobles actually could do a lot more in some unreleased prototype versions of the game, they would have their own plots and objectives. It turns out that this was nearly impossible for a human to follow, due to the sheer combinatorial complexity of having every single noble taking complex actions. The game is designed to be very transparent about why a noble is doing, and what they are doing, to allow the player to be the main actor in the game, rather than needing a week plotting graphs and reading logs to understand how each and every noble is acting and what their motives are. It may return in a later version, possible as an optional additional feature, for people who think the main game is too simple.
You're correct that societies have changed, and are currently simpler. The reason was the most of the heirarchy was invisible most of the time (you never cared about the counts vassalised under a different Duchess), and therefore the player either was unaware of important characters, or that most of the characters would have to be irrelevant. With the new system, every noble is present in every decision and the player gets to know all of them. No-one is 'hidden'. If your enthralled exists in a society then they'll need to learn all that society's nobles, and interact with them throughout the game, or find ways to have them removed.
I really like some of the advantages of the heirarchy system, especially some gameplay which hasn't been explored in any version (such as pulling strings in court to get a useful noble added to your pool of vassals, or trying to get one of your loyal spies into a rival Duke's vassalage). As such, in future versions we intend to re-introduce unlanded titles, such as command over a province, or special roles, giving special actions, such as inquisitor or spymaster. This would give better progression to the game, as you would need to slowly progress your enthralled up the ranks, as you did previously.