And we literally cannot know which of us is right, because it would require us to have internal documents from the post-public-playtest phase (when the vast majority of these maneuvers were created, because again, remember that something like half or more of 5e only crystallized in the last 6 months before it went to print!)
Sure, we cannot know 100% for certain. I'm just saying the evidence definitely stacks up more in favor of the Battlemaster being meant to mechanically fulfill the 4e Warlord. To recap, this is because they included 4e Warlord only effects for the 5e Battlemaster and because they haven't created a Warlord class in how many years?
Having to wait until high level to actually get your class fantasy was, as I understood it, one of the specific things 5e was trying to tackle. This, at the very least, would seem to be an admission of partial failure.
I mean it's still slightly better than the champion and still not as bad as a beastmaster ranger. It failed to be the Warlord replacement that 4e fans wanted, but that was inevitable as they still don't actually know what they want. I think the bigger issue is that it failed to be competitve with the warlordy battlemaster for most of the game - which is probably the bigger design issue.
You may not find it compelling, but it rather succinctly communicates what I--and others--have wanted. And it's not unique to this thread. People, at the very least myself, have been saying this for literally years, that the Eldritch Knight is to the Wizard what we see the Battle Master being to the Warlord: a thin, pale shadow, something that, yes, it does contain a seed of the baseline mechanics/concept, but it is far to fundamentally Fighter-y to ACTUALLY do the job. I mean, if the BM contained ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER of the Warlord, you wouldn't even bother suggesting it--but by that same token, the Valor Bard and Inquisitive/Mastermind Rogue contain something of the Warlord while still failing to hit the mark.
So part of our communication problem is that you keep wanting to talk mechanics in response to my talk about concept.
Conceptually a Warlord is a Warrior that leads. So a Fighter with Leader abilities fits that bill. What you actually want isn't anything that's different conceptually. You want a different mechanical representation of that same concept. I get that. But I'm trying to bring up why maybe that isn't actually such a good idea.
To perhaps turn this around: What, exactly, does the Wizard (not its subclasses, just the base class itself) do for its concept that the Eldritch Knight doesn't? The only class features a Wizard had prior to Tasha's were Arcane Recovery, Spell Mastery, and Signature Spells--and both of the last two are literally just "cast more of the spells you like most." All three are about as flavor-packed as boiled oats.
Eldritch Knight is explicitly a hybrid of Fighter and Wizard. So the question as is doesn't make sense. I'll adapt it to what I think you are trying to ask:
Could we remove the Wizard class entirely, change the EK concept as listed for the Wizard concept and would that mechanically fulfill the concept of Wizard (not D&D Wizard, as that's rather a concept unto itself, but just a conceptual Wizard)? Yes - although the weapons and armor and fighting stuff is a bit extraneous to Wizard so it's not a perfect match.
Contrast a similar scenario with Warlord. Suppose there was a Warlord class. Could we remove that class entirely, change the Battlemaster concept as listed for the Warlord concept while simultaneously restricting maneuvers to the Warlordy ones, and would we be able to create a battlemaster that mechanically fulfills the concept of Warlord? Yes - even better than the EK/Wizard, there's nothing mechanically extraneous.
The only other thing that EKs can't do that Wizards can is transcribe spells. Is that really SO dramatically important that it, alone, makes the EK completely and thoroughly disconnected from the Wizard class concept? I...just don't buy it myself. "Spell research" is effectively a non-entity for the Wizard; I've gone on record both here and at GITP that this is actually the biggest reason why people don't feel the Wizard, Warlock, and Sorcerer are sufficiently distinct, because the Wizard literally doesn't do anything to support its concept besides "cast MOAR SPELZ."
The question should be: is this concept representable by these mechanics?
I think you are way to focused on mechanical distinctions. That drives you to make this a mechanics first question instead of a concept first question.
"Conceptual overlap" is already covered by "reduplicated effort." And, as noted, I don't actually see this as REDUCING the Fighter's space at all; I see it as letting the Fighter be focused on, y'know, doing actual Fightery things. Particularly since we're talking about a subclass, which the Fighter can totally keep. Like...adding the Warlord literally does not require that we change ONE THING about the Fighter, so you're inventing a con that doesn't exist. Further, I already covered multiclassing as a con, so....yeah, you're definitely just repeating what I already said there.
Right now the Battlemaster can represent any leader from mediocre to expert. Adding in a 'better leader' takes away at least some of that space. That's a pretty trivial observation.
The bounded accuracy thing, though, is an idea I hadn't covered. What do you mean by this? I had assumed whatever a Warlord did would already be perfectly fine with that, since it's kind of a central design conceit regardless of my feelings on the matter (and regardless of the fact that it is neither particularly bounded, nor particularly about accuracy.)
Whatever the Warlord mechanics end up being, they are another untyped bonus that can stack with every other bonus already present in D&D. This in general is why class bloat using alot of different mechanics for similar effects is bad. Even adding another d8 to accuracy or skill checks could easily break bounded accuracy compared to what bards/rogues/casters can allow.
I'll try to get to the rest later.
