I havent played the few latest versions, but it has both good improvements as well as improvements that are not so good. Overall the game is better, but the whole "multiple generations" thing simply does not go well with mount and blade, and their attempt to force it to work just made the game kind of bad. Maybe with a lot more work they could get it down, but at least in the versions I played there was a serious issue with level cap. Basically if you do pretty much anything it will give you levels in that thing. BUT there is a limit to how many cumulative levels you can have. What this means? Lets say you want to play as a crossbowman, then you must NEVER use any other weapon then crossbow in battle, if you as much as fire a single arrow from a bow, or swing at an enemy with an axe for a single time this will permanently lock higher levels of your crossbowmanship. Or at least until you max out levels, then this does not matter. Authors said that without level cap each character would be the same, but considering how long it takes to get to the next character the game is long over before that happens, and something tells me that if we start burning through characters at a pace fast enough to matter then it will be so fast each character will feel just the same...
But overall I would agree with dehimos, it is better then original with no mods, but not better then original with mods.