Wake's overhaul is vastly closer to both setting verisimilitude and 'realism' (i.e. how premodern battles were actually fought as opposed to arbitrary tabletop mechanics) than SFO (insofar as the design philosophy is to extrapolate everything from the former, maximizing factional asymmetries in logistics and tactics)- but it's out of date for the current patch (you can roll back via the betas system) and undergoing a rebuild for game 2. It broadly has the ambitions to be DeI etc. for this game, but has a long, long way to go. Battle time and gameplay are a lot closer to what you'd see in good Medieval 2 mods (Stainless Steel, Third Age, etc.) than any of the more recent TWs- which is to say, slow paced with a large emphasis on positioning and morale. Arbitrary equivalencies are reduced or erased (and I believe will be diminished even further); a goblin hero has 800 hp, a human hero 1300; a typical Warboss, Vampire, or Chaos Champion in the low to mid 2000s, Kholek like 10,000, etc. Likewise, orc boyz really do tear humans limb from limb in this mod; human line infantry don't really stand a chance in any resembling an equal engagement, and must hold while relying on cavalry or artillery to do the job. It also uses caps for units so you can't casually fill stacks with dragons and demigryphs late game.
That said, don't expect anything resembling the base game's balance- dragons, Kholek, etc. can singlehandedly wipe entire low-tier armies. Might be worth tweaking the game (can't do it via workshop mods) to allow for 40 or more units per stack, just to better facilitate for-cost parity when the big guns are involved.
SFO is alright. Better flow than vanilla, although there is some fucked balance (Hellblaster guns cost not much different from great cannons and are trivially the best artillery in the game in that mod, etc.); i'd install the extra unit removal submod, as they've started on the Radious road of adding lots of stupid, incongruous bullshit, altthough some of the things they throw in (Knights Panther, Black Orcs with Shields, Huntsmen) are fine. I've generally found Wood Elves incredibly overtuned in SFO- glade guard with shields wind up competitive with chaos warriors thanks to golden shield rating + high melee attack and defense, wood elves all have fatigue resistance now so they don't really tire and your cav often will exhaust itself trying to catch their archers.
I'd advise using Cataph's Southern Realms and Kraka Drak; a DLC's worth of factions with custom units, custom LLs, tech trees, etc. all for free with good quality and correspondence to what fluff is available. The other faction mods (mixxu's stuff etc.) are mostly horrible with bloated, inane rosters.
A few other mods add a fair bit- Ultimate Undead for SFO removes some retarded crap like Undead having fatigue and makes them play a lot differently, Campaigns of the Old World with or without SFO is pretty good for adding a little more depth to the strategic layer (the Buildings Overhaul that whoever made is great if you aren't using SFO), the GCCM campaign map pack adds a lot of interesting if sometimes AI-dysfunctional maps (including ,complete, non-retarded siege maps and actual town maps). I find 77 is a good number of mods to use for this game, because adding any more causes crash on campaign load no matter what they are. If you squint hard enough, it becomes almost fun.
I preordered Warhammer 2. Kill me.