You guys deriding the tech tree are being downright silly.  Yes, tech trees are a gating mechanism.  They are also an abstraction, and they fit perfectly well with the genre and the lore.

Are you looking at techs from your own perspective, already knowing how all the things you are researching are supposed to work? Or, are you putting yourself into the role of a monarch thrust into an uncivilized world that has lost all knowledge?

I'll just touch on a few techs I have seen brought up.

Mining:

I may know the general process of turning ore into metal.  That doesn't make me an expert on mining.  Your sovern and his followers may know even less.  Let's throw ourselves into character.  We have no internet.  We have no books.  We have some old armor and weapons laying about though!

"Look, I am holding cold hard steel in my hand!  Come on people, make me some more!" you exclaim to your meagre followers.  You are greeted with blank stares and nervous shuffles.

"But sire!  We have no metal!" one exasperated youth blurts out, immediately hanging his head in shame.

"Well, go get some then.  I have seen in my exporation, an area that looks vaguely like the areas of old, where mining used to take place."  You are feeling pretty confident now.  Soon things will be smelting along smoothly.  You are sure of it.

Shortly after, your men come back to your town and dump a collection of rocks on the ground in front of you.  "Randolf here," the speaker motions to one of his fellow miners, "he had a really good idea and suggested we bring back as many different kinds of rocks as we could find."

"Yeah," another says, "we don't really knows whats we was supposed to be looking for.  Not really."

You examine the pile of rubble on the floor and soon realise, you don't know what you're looking for either.  Previously, you had gathered together some of the bightest minds in camp, to try and figure out ways to make your new settlement more livable.  "I best consult with my sages.  Perhaps one of them knows something of this matter."

The next day, you find the sages gathered around a roaring fire.  At your approach, Gandarf, your head researcher says, "We've been trying to melt these various rocks to see what we can get out of them, but this fire, I fear we can not get it hot enough!"

"Add more wood then," you reply.

"We have, sire!  We've been tending this fire all night, and still the rocks have not yeilded their secrets!"

"Keep trying," you say. "I am confident you will find a solution.  Perserverance, my friend."

Many days later, Gandarf comes running at you excitedly.  "Sire!" he gasps, "we have done it!  It is a very intensive process sire, but many new ideas have come to fruition in the realisation of this venture!"

"Firstly," he explains, "we had the men crush the rock we were interested in.  We also had to find a way to melt the metal out of the rock and catch it so it was not contamated in the ashes of the fire.  That was not easy either, sire! Let me explain..." Your eyes glaze over, as Gandorf blathers on about things your lessors should be more concerned with, than you. "...to make the fires hot enough, we needed to devolop bellows, to get the charcoal I mentioned earlier..."  You let him finish his dissertation, so as to appear the caring and wise leader.

"Not all the rocks yeild anything," he continues, "so we meticullously kept track of every different rock we had.  Only rocks like this one," he says as he holds up a veiny looking rock proudly, "are of any use to as at all."

"Perfect!  I will send the miners to collect as many of these rocks as we can find."

Not long after, the supply of easily available ore is getting harder and harder to come by.  You task Gandorf with finding ways to get at the much harder to attain ore.  He fasions something he calls a "pick" and instructs the men to chip at the rocks with them.

Research unlocked!  Mining!  Abstraction isn't so bad now, is it?

I'm running out of steam now, so some abbridged versions.

Blacksmithing:

"How am I supposed to work this lump of metal?" Horath muses.

Weaponsmithing:

"This junk Horath made keeps breaking when I hit things!  And it can't hold an edge for shit!" Randolf bemoans.

Armor:

Horath seems quite put out with you.  "I simply do not know how you expect me to make all these little rings of steel.  And then you want me to link them together in a mesh?  How am I supposed to do that?" he whines.

Animal Husbandry:

"Our fastest men can not catch these wild beasts sire, we will have to find a way to contain them."

Mounted Warfare:

"Randorf got kicked in the head again!"  Wild laughter follows.

(Anyone thinking training a horse, domesticated or not, to be an easy or skill-less task, quite frankly doesn't know what the hell they are talking about.  Training a horse to willfully charge into battle with weapons flying everywhere, yes, harder.)

I am not entirely satisfied with the adventuring side of the tech tree.  But they are still needed for balance and pacing.  Some better explanations of the abstractions used there would be good.  Maybe that will be something comming in the campaigns?

While the game is familiar to anyone who has played WoM, for me, the two games are also night and day in terms of fun factor and polish.  I hadn't played a game of WoM since near release.  After giving the FE beta a spin and going back to look at WoM, it's obvious how far things have come and how much things have changed, for the better.  Even in this early beta, FE has the one more turn thing locked down.  WoM never had that.

Things still need some balance and tweaking.  But last time I checked, we were in early beta, with no fixed release date.  Things are looking pretty sweet, from where I'm sitting.

Those of you that don't like the way things are, seem to be looking for a different kind of game than this actually is designed to be.