This is how we play it. Sorry if my previous post wasn’t clear. We’ve had situations in which players repeatedly fail to activate their units to perform actions that aren’t free and after a few games of this they’re ready to go back to playing rules in which they have a little more control over what their units do. It comes down to how much control a player likes to have. Some folks in our group really enjoy not knowing from turn to turn what they can cajole their troops to do. It drives others batty.
This can be a problem (at least for some players) with lots of games with activation rolls (Warmaster, Black Powder, etc, etc). With most of these games its important that a player has enough commands / activations that if 1 or 2 fail on a turn they still have units to activate. Most activations in TMWWBKs are fairly likely, and along with the Free actions, you do get most stuff to do something most turns. But the dice can be against you! But if you only have a couple of units to command you can easily find them doing nothing much a turn.
At least in TMWWBK an order failure doesn't end the turn, like in some of the Rampant series rules - this really annoyed me, and felt too random.
We also found that the officer traits and the scenarios generally made a big difference to the fun of the game.