I always knew BE were bad, but recently SOTL pointed out in his video that masonry and architecture block bonus damage of the BE. The numbers line up in such a way that considering all upgrades, BE only does 1 bonus damage vs buildings in both castle and imp. At that point its DPS would be barely better than knight-line. So, BE cannot catch villagers and they cannot take down the buildings they build any better than a knight. I always thought that bonus vs buildings is one of the main reasons to go for BE over knight, but not anymore.
BE are such an underused unit, the least the devs could do is change the armor class of the bonus damage to same as champion so it isn’t negated. It isn’t currently an issue since no one reacts to BE by getting those upgrades, but it will be when more people realize it now that SOTL made a video about it.
There is so little reason to make BE these days. Knights are always superior on Arabia, and on closed maps the devs buffed other elephants without addressing any of the problems of the BE. The best BE civs usually go for other elephants (Bengalis have EAs, Khmer have BAE, etc.). BE getting blocked by Masonry is just excessive and unnecessary.