A spiritual successor to HOMM4 with art design on par with HOMM3 and some polish would be a better move. 4 improves on 3 in almost every way but is fuck ugly, has a dogshit AI, and lacks a random map generator.
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So HoMM has to miss out on a basic feature because then its other design failures would become even more problematic? Sounds about right.
Basic feature from what? I actually legit don't remember if Homm3 had fog of war.
HOMM3 is a charming, but simplistic game. I've played it probably thousands of hours, on and off for the last ~21 years. I play it still. That said, the general meta in battles boils down to 'archers gud, when meleeing try to always hit first unless you have no retaliation or you've spent their retaliation. Unless you're running around with Luna or smth. Anyway, cheese is the name of the game.
HOMM4 changes this with the simultaneous retaliations. A great deal of the time you can't expect to win a fight with zero losses. Additionally, most units have innate abilities that interact with each other. Line of sight matters a great deal, archers can generally not shoot at an enemy unit if another enemy is standing in the way. Caster units cast from a spellbook and have spellpoints, meaning they can be drained of spell points and left unable to cast, or be made to take damage every time they cast, and either way you select what you cast from the spells in the spellbook, according to the needs of the situation.
Morale is a lot more interesting, now. Penalties from mixing armies of several factions can be severe, and if you want to use units of opposed or opposed-adjacent alignment you will need plenty of artifacts or some ranks of the Leadership secondary skill. Factions and alignment tie into a lot of things, such as spell availability and recruitable hero classes. For example, on the one side you have access to the macroeconomic Lord with the important Nobility skill line, but no access to the Thief, which does double duty as scout and a stealth capable that can flag mines and snag resources without fighting, depending on level of skill and level of guardians. Both hero types giving strong economic benefit, but mutually exclusive and very different ways of playing. Their utility makes one or the other almost a necessity, but how much do you want to invest in heroes with a non combat skillset outside of the bare minimum when you could be prioritising someone else? Might sets itself apart by having no access to magic hero classes at all, and no mage guild, but starting out with instant access to the incredibly important Combat skill. Going full barbarian, no magic, is actually viable, and even fun. At all times during play there are more considerations to take into account than in the preceding game.
Gone is the infinite resupply chain, as every unit has its individually tracked movement pool. Caravans make it easier to recruit from dwellings or send armies between towns. Citadel and Castle is no longer a no brainer and is more situational as they only help during defense. The investment/return ratio on Town and City Hall is lower than it used to be - Capitol is no longer a thing. Weekly restocking of troops is replaced with a constant, gradual growth - no more day 7 sniping, and so on. Income from your town alone WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH to purchase all your weekly growth in a town with creature dwellings. Creature dwellings accumulate creatures, week by week, and weekly resource generators no longer need to have a hero stop by every week to collect. Spellpoints are less plentiful, with fewer wells scattered about and mage guilds restoring spell points at a percentage according to the level of the mage guild, although spells are cheaper to cast.
Having heroes participate directly in battle is not an upgrade so much as a sidegrade. It's just different. It works pretty well when the xp gain is downtuned, as with the mods. Various types of heroes can be a force multiplier, but can be fragile and possibly expensive to develop. Certainly expensive in terms of opportunity costs. The whole advanced classes thing is cool too.
In the vanilla state the game is badly balanced and buggy. With Equilibris or more especially the recently released Ultimate mod, it becomes apparent how much more depth there is to this game than HOMM3. It's impressive, really, how many issues they fixed over HOMM3 and how many things they iterated on. If it hadn't been such an unpolished mess, I'm sure it woulld have turned into something great. You can already see the outline of what could have been in what's already there.
These are some of the reasons you're wrong about saying I'm wrong. HOMM4 is a gem in the (noticably) rough.
