Hahaha!
Well, they've been fun... I've found that playing the game in the same mind-set as SBG works; it's very easy in SBG to advance lines of warriors across the battlefield and grind them against eachother for the whole game. What stops this is playing scenarios and adding lots of scenery to break up the battlefield.
It's the same with Warhammer now- a decent amount of scenery is essential and the scenarios really add a lot of balance and result in much better games than meat-grinding.
I'm finding it a lot more tactically challenging than 8th too- games of 8th were fairly predictable and due to the lack of speed when maneuvering or reforming, you became limited in tactics once a game started and you were committed to a course of action.
Being able to reform freely in AoS is great- you can advance in blocks, move into a line to engage and then envelop; you can have proper skirmish lines that are able to fall back through the lines of heavy infantry as the enemy closes; due to the 3" combat 'pull-in', you can guard units well and have more of your units involved in combat.
It feels more representative of medieval / fantasy warfare.
It's taken a lot of games to get some idea of balance sorted- but just looking at eachother's armies at the start and saying "does this look fair?" is golden- we've made mistakes and played some horrendously unbalanced games, but it didn't matter and we still had fun. There's less aggro and less checking of the rules.
The pace is good too. Game turns seem to take the same length of time as before, but you're always doing something. There's very little waiting around for your turn to do something. The game is busy and much more engaging.
In my opinion.
Still sound like a press release? Maybe! But I really do enjoy the game, much more than I thought I would too!