[Ygorl]

For what it's worth, I agree that these mounted sacred glamorous high-defense types are too good a value. They were also quite powerful in Dom2, but people didn't cry about them as much. The dual-bless vans were acknowledged to be powerful, but not overpowering; why are they a bigger problem in Dom3?
I don't think it's just the extra design points that it's possible to get, since it's possible to build an absolutely brutal Helheim nation even with an awake pretender.
I don't think it's that other nations have gotten weaker; they're not.
Maybe it's that it takes longer to research useful counter spells? Or that gold income is so much higher, allowing the purchase of many more of the cavalry in question? Any other ideas as to why they seem to be relatively more problematic than in the previous edition? I can't think of any, offhand...
Seems like pretty much everyone agrees that the number of viable strategies that lose to this strategy is greater than the number that lose to any other strategy. Not everyone agrees that this is a problem, but I do - as has been already said lots of times, if you want an easier game, play single-player against wimpy AI, or against other new players, or against an experienced player who's fooling around with a weird sub-optimal strategy. If you do think there should be built-in handicaps, make a mod to do that. I don't see any reason why the pure game should be unbalanced ("flawed"?) in any preventable way.
Assuming everyone out there now agrees with me (ha!) it doesn't seem very hard to fix. Glamor is a nifty ability, and I'm happy with it the way it is - just make the troops that have it cost more (and especially the problematic sacreds). I'm pretty sure dual-blessers would still happily buy Vans and their cousins at 90 or 100 gold a pop, or even more. I'm also pretty sure that they'd still do well with them, just not as overpoweringly well. Folks not going the mega-bless route would then probably do a bit better to stick with the non-sacreds (whose cost might only be slightly increased), which seems fine to me.

There are plenty of good strategies out there. The mega-blessed, glamorous, super-high-defense unit, though, is very good against most of them. Those strategies which can counter it are (I think?) not nearly as universally powerful. An army of blessed Vans does very well in nearly all early-mid-game circumstances; slave-lizard hordes not as much. My opinion of this strategy is not as high as that of some folks, and I think some very nice tests have been run by people here showing that it is definitely possible to beat MBGSHD (especially in pitched battles), but even so it is so generally powerful that I'd be happy to see it weakened.