It's not a peasant revolt, it's a different kind of revolt. I can't remember the name of it, but it does mention nobles in the text when you get the revolt in your own realm. They're a lot more powerful than a peasant revolt and they create a kingdom when they win and the King gets the "liberator" nickname.
2.0 rebalanced the levy system completely and unfortunately since the patch was coming out with Sons of Abraham they didn't go through the public beta patch process they usually do which let some very glaring mistakes make it through. One of which was that revolts had not been rebalanced to match the new levy system. This has been fixed now in 2.0.2.
Honestly I'm pretty happy with the way the development has been going, stuff like this does pop up, but this game has continued development for a lot longer than most other games I've played. Some pretty nasty errors like this pop up now and then but generally things get fixed and the games gets better. I'd definitely recommend opting into beta patches for Crusader Kings if you have it through steam. Usually they fix more stuff than they break. This revolt balancing problem was fixed pretty quickly with the beta patch, but it took the official patch took quite a bit longer to come out.
Once again, no, it wasn't a faction or anything, it was a peasant revolt against the Dutch invaders.
They called themselves the "Irish Liberation Army", they won and created and claimed for themselves the "Kingdom of Ireland" at the same time, even though they only controlled two counties in Ireland. Then they started annexing the rest of Ireland with their super-stacks because the independent counties could only muster 400 units to their 8000.
To me, it sounds more like you saw one bug (the peasant rebels not taking into account the levy changes) and condemned the whole game.
I gave off a list of a half-dozen different bugs and other stupid things happening.
It sounds to me like you're only listening to the one bug that most stood out to you, and condemned my whole argument.
Yeah, you're totally blowing it out of proportion, If it's so unplayable like you describe no one would play the game.
Two things:
First, a quick look at the achievement boards states that only 5% of players ever use Ironman Mode, the mode that exists explicitly for preventing savescumming. My complaint was that this sort of utterly random crap is easily countered through savescumming, so that tells me an awful lot about how people are playing this game. It also tells me how utterly garbage Paradox's crapshoot events sub-systems are in this supposedly strategic game. There is little to nothing at all strategic about these random events, but they tend to make up the bulk of what you contend with in the game, because few events besides open conflict can be resolved with actual strategy.
Second, it's pretty clear that most players are going the easier road of either playing as a king or emperor or else playing as someone who can easily marry into, inherit, or usurp a kingdom or empire. The fact that most of these problems I'm complaining about are so unsolvable at the duke/count level is probably why most people are not playing these smaller roles.
So yes, apparently, nobody is playing the game, at least, the one I'm playing.