Well... to be fair... they are STILL 'crap' atm. So he is right.
It is a harsh word, but what I think he means is the whole "risk v reward" (old Mantra of the Brad/Jerry days of EQ) is askew for the Diplo horses.
We can all agree (all races I have tried, excluding knowledge of Goblin, Orc, Gnome, Ravi) getting 12.5s by level 10 is a non-issue. If you want to have 12.5s for your horse the moment you ding... you can. In fact, you will likely have 2-3x as much as you need.
So... getting a storebought horse involves no more effort than picking the color and possibly having to travel for that color (vs the no-choice we get on Diplo horse, so it is red-only apples and M&Ms to compare those on that basis)
To get the diplo horse, you STILL need to be lvl 10 (they just changed it so can be level 100 diplo, which I propose will take you MUCH longer than hitting lvl 10 if you started xping the day you got the quest at diplo 40...) adventurer/crafter and do a long-ish ride with possibly a very hard or 2 parlay to do part one. Then a very long (for some like Derogar's Post to Three Rivers) ride in under 40 mins AND succeed at 3+ parlays, 2 of which were hardish and one easy and one hard.
I took much less time to get to 10 on 4 chars so far than the time it took to get that quest completed on 2 of my chars. And both chars were lvl 10 (required then) adventurers who could survive the aggro on the trip (both died 1 time however)
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That thread says there will be upgrades to level 2 and 3 Diplo horses. So ... one should hope so...since there are upgrades to lvl 2 and 3 bought horses, in the game now.
That thread says/infers (only because it is 'further down the line' that there will be upgrades to your horsers (not specifically including rank 1 but hope so) to make them BETTER than storebought. THAT is the key...once we see that and the difficulty in getting that - that is when we can say Diplo horses are not 'crap'
For now, compared to store bought...they are sadly still 'crap'
(My 2nd Diplo bought a horse in addition to the diplo one he had...why? because he has now 1.02g at lvl 14 ... and wth SHOULD he travel slower than the majority of players that are not diplomats
)