Personally, I think it would be better to do no indies for the next game. That would help remove the feeling of the AI recruiting walls of chaff. While the BI mod does help a lot with that, the AI will still use every opportunity to spam units at you without rhyme or reason. The major consequences of this to players are the removal of recruitable indy commanders and mages, which is unfortunate. But those could be added back in, if you are willing to spend the time on it in mapmaking, or you could use something like my mod that adds some indies back in. Or you could use semi-rand. Lots of options
I don't think anyone is complaining that the AI is not a challenge
I think it is just not the kind of challenge that Ano would prefer. I think the inclusion of AI nations is probably one of the most controversial aspects of the series. The last one may as well not even be a human VS game, with the likely strength of the AIs. They will probably occupy all human attention, and possibly even wipe out entire teams by themselves. I would instead bill it as a survival game, and leave out some of the other elements. But I think also that the bonuses given to the AI should be known about pre-game. Anyway, this is just what I think, feel free to ignore me
As far as that game goes, it seems likely the AI is going to have to be taken down by a concerted effort from the players. Bickering is likely to just leave you all weakened. Even normal AIs can be a bit of a pain to deal with. Jacked up ones like this one are probabl going to be show stealers :P