Yea "Honour" is misleading. Really the name should be "Glory" because that is more of what it is. If it were honour, then thief ops wouldn't give any, because they go by unnoticed, and there is no honour among thieves.
Glory resembles what the current honour system is because it is based on conquest and warring which really is what "top honour means" is that you warred a lot and warred other kingdoms who warred a lot. Not always in an "honourable" way.
Also ranks such as Lord, Count, Marquis, prince etc throughout history were given to almost exclusively NOT the most honourable people in a kingdom but to those born into priveledge of families who gained their wealth preying on the weak through slavery and servitude. So lets not pull the whole "they aren't being honourable though!" card.
As far as I know the only diplo they have given to us (a kingdom double their size) is "we will retal 1-1 until you stop and CF" OK... well meter is going to max out eventually so good call?
Again.. we were only going to wave for a bit of honour (expected) in exchange for a cf. Ruthless (lol @ kd theme/name and then crying bully) then get all hot and bothered that a #6 honour kd was getting hit for honour vs a #2 honour kd (surprise?).
Next time secure your CF's. Want to know why we aren't getting vultured? forethought. We knew what size we would be at, and so during wars, eowcf, etc we made CF deals to protect us from the majority of kd's that would be a threat to us once we hit fort/normal. Dealbreaks are one thing. Those are unnacceptable. Not securing CF's with kd's that have an advantage over you when you have something they desire (in this case high honour provinces in the range of half our attacker core) is a mistake that you made, not one that we did. You have noone to blame but yourself for getting hit, and especially noone to blame but yourself for escalating a conflict against a kingdom twice your size instead of taking steps to de-escalate the conflict.
Edit: a lot of this post is written as if you are in Ruthless, though I don't know what kd you are part of. Either way this is written to people in Ruthless that think that somehow they are being bullied by unreasonable people.