Let's make our own models (and maybe even animations)

Well, I don't know, on the one hand, it's right to do your own thing, but on the other hand, you're directly comparing games... (in my opinion, it's the opposite; Heroes 5 is a special game, and in a technically worse sense). I won't go into detail, I'll just say briefly: the Heroes 5 Community is very weak for what it is, that's one. The game isn't particularly popular due to the short-sightedness of Ubisoft and one "modder" who has the 3.0 source code, that's two. The ability to export models with new animations and skeletons was discovered too late, and with such good restrictions that add a lot of hassle, that's three. From a graphical point of view (lighting, shadows, the same vertex maps that it's unclear how to make work), it's a dead zone. For games that came out earlier, you can either put a graphical shell on top of the standard one (also ENB for GTA and other games), or their graphics are an order of magnitude better, and you can only nitpick to separate models into cutscene and in-game models (for example, Age of Empires 3). My conclusion is this: hoping that someone will listen is very naive; there's simply no one to do it.