Not all nations have good blessable troops. But in a long term game, blesses don't matter as much. You hear more about them because they are so important in blitz, and the nature of the beast is that a lot more blitzes have been completed than long-term games. In a long-term game, a bless is useful for expanding your territory rapidly so that by the time your troops start to suck, it doesn't matter. And, CB tries to make bless a little weaker in general. So your lack of bless is not really your problem. Your lack of income is.
Movement speed doesn't matter much for initial expansion, but it matters a lot if you need to fight another player. Arco is definitely a nation that wins or loses based on research and gem income, rather than blesses.
Victory points accelerate the game by encouraging war without artificially disrupting the game strategy. Normally, the top nation has little incentive to get involved in a war, because they are already winning. All they have to do is keep building up and eventually they will be unstoppable. Victory points remove "victory through inevitability" and require players to fight sooner rather than later. This saves everybody lots of time, especially the top players, who have to struggle under the burden of managing their enormous empires.
In the other game I am in, without VPs, one of the two strongest nations is just sitting around building strength (the other one keeps getting attacked by everybody). If VPs were enabled, these two nations would be at war already as each would be within striking distance of the required 40%.
60% is too high, at 60%, the outcome is already decided. In fact, 40% is toward the high end of useful victory point settings. The only reason I set it as high as I did is to prevent a nation with a bless-rush and a lucky spawn from claiming both triple-VP provinces and a couple others and winning before the game really gets going. With 40% you need 12 VPs, too much to get with an early game rush for most plausible initial setups.