I’m not going to get into a debate with you about whether the Vikings were great.  But your summary of them exemplified perfectly what I mean by Viking fan wankery.  I’m glad you are happy/proud to be from wherever you are from – not that lack of pride in my heritage really has anything to do with my opinions on vikings.

Why did GW give Bretonnia a Bombard?  Because at that time, GW hadn’t written Bretonnia into the weird, backwards, Monty Pythonesque faction that they ultimately became by the time WFB was cancelled.  Bretonnians “eschew gunpowder” only because GW wrote them that way, and by writing them in such a way they made them look and feel out of place in the world.  You can’t explain why they’re an anachronism using their lore because it is their lore that causes it. I know all about the lore, it’s not even particularly bad lore were it not for the fact it doesn’t fit within the context that it is placed. Albion would work less well than Bretonnia.  That’s not to say you couldn’t write a convincing faction, only that you couldn’t do it and not have them look even more out of place than Bretonnia.

Finally it’s s got absolutely nothing to do with what I like – I am not making any decisions about what is and is not included in warhammer the old world.  By telling me that if I like East Asian stuff so much I should go and play another game, you do sound very much as though you feel I am somehow responsible for the introduction of Cathay and thus ruining your fun.  I can’t control what GW do and do not introduce into the game.  But you asked (I will remind you for a second time) whether including Cathay makes sense and the answer is that yes it does and for lots of reasons.  It feels more like what you wanted to ask was “who else doesn’t like the inclusion of Cathay’?  End of the day, you could in theory shoehorn any faction you like into the game and make it kind of work, GW have chosen to with Cathay when it seems you would have preferred something else.  Well life’s a bitch, time to suck it up and move on, we don’t always get what we want.

By way of a summary, in my personal opinion, Cathay is an excellent fit for Warhammer the Old World.  Strip away my personal opinion and they make about as much sense as pretty much anything else you could imagine would make.