Um, think they should maybe be a bit more unified, at least enough that they're more willing to fund a standing military. If all they really have is a calvary then they miss out completely on some of the cool stuff we talked about before.
By 'standing military' I mean 'there is no unified army across the whole empire'. The military situation is very much based on the HRE's decline (though in this case it's just that there was no real unity to start with), with the 'elite' stuff coming from being based on the ERE.
Plus standing armies as a whole went out of fashion in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire for the most part and didn't come back until after the medieval period for a variety of reasons, so it's not unreasonable to have the interesting stuff without a permanent force.