I'll just add a singular thought. Any side with numbers would probably try to surround a combatant and overbear or grapple somebody ... just thought I'd throw that out there, in case you ever want to remind the players that they aren't gods of slaughter.

I didn't notice that difference vs AD&D. Good thing none of my players are fighters.

It's not just being able to cut through a mob of bandits (although that's certainly cool).  There are some really dangerous monsters with only one or two hit dice: most normal-sized snakes, giant centipedes, stirges, and ghouls to name a few.  When you fall in the viper pit, heroic fighting can be a matter of life or death.

Heh heh heh.

I have had quite the opposite problem, as I made my fighter with the idea of taking command of mooks and chopping through hordes of....mooks!  But, either me and the other players are too powerful for that scenario or our gm doesn't want to,  for the most part, let me steal the show. Howevor......  single hit dice enemies have become the exception rather then the rule. And now I realise that even by the time I have the heroic feat apply to creatures of two hit dice, at that party level even they will be the exception.....
        I guess the problem is that as long as I exist, these low hit dice creatures can't make a real threat to me, and extensively, the party,  therefore they are not worth encountering.  I have pointed out that even when I am level nine and gain an army (a goal I am working dilligently towards), that army is comprised of single hit die mooks.  Therefore, how come despite never confronting a boss of such high constitution,  I rarely find enemy minions to be just, minions? 
           Thanks for letting me rant on this obscure frustration, I do understand that especially when I double my attack rate there is almost no point in slowing down the game for the sake of a blood quenching grind that we all know the outcome of (mostly).  thoughts?
 

Yeah, if your Ref. is altering the lay of the land to avoid your character's using an ability ... well, it's odd to me. Also, from a Reffing POV, easier just to disallow the technique. Or triple the mook number. It's hard to go wrong with triple mooks. It is known.

Most of the followers you get at higher level are level 0, because it is assumed that they would be fighting against other creatures of comparable strength most of the time. If your castle always gets attacked by giants and wyverns, they can't really do much against them and would die like flies if ordered into battle.
Instead of having the enemies be close to equal in strength to the PCs, there should mostly be just a lot more of them. If you get attacked by 20 bandits who come from all directions, even your three attacks per rounds and good chance for two kills per round won't make the encounter trivial.

This is something that is very different in d20 games, which are so fiddly that no GM really wants to have a lot of creatures involved in any fight. It even outright says that you shouldn't even bother with enemies, if the party can take on more than 10 at the same time. But that makes followers and ordinary mercenaries pretty much irrelevant.

Interestingly, the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master Guide was still written under that premise. But then it got immediately abandoned in all further publications.