I started playing through FE5 (Thracia 776). I'm only on chapter 3, but so far it's not nearly as difficult as people make it out to be. Why hasn't the capturing feature ever come back?
Heh... You haven't even hit the hard parts yet. However, a fair bit of the difficulty in Thracia 776 is because the situations the game throws the player into, rather than the raw stats of the enemies.