Quote Originally Posted by Malimar View Post
As Rockphed says, baron-tier vassals don't count towards the vassal limit. In general, having an extra county with vassal barons is better in every way than having a barony in your demesne. Barons never factionalize or revolt or even desire higher titles, so there's really no reason to keep a barony unless you're not above your demesne limit and don't have a county to replace it with.

I usually find that the tech benefits of having a demesne of widely-distributed counties are outweighed by the various "I want that county" vassal opinion penalties you might pick up. Really, for technology purposes, unless one of your demesne counties is Constantinople, any distribution of demesne is going to be inferior to just parking your spymaster in Constantinople.

I usually pick two nice duchies (or even only one, if it's a really nice duchy, like Brugge), keep all the counties in those duchies, both duchy titles, and the kingdom title for those duchies, and I give all the other duchies in the kingdom to king vassals so they de jure drift out of the kingdom. After a hundred years, none of my vassals want any of my demesne titles. There's no reason to eat the "I want that title" opinion penalty if you don't have to.
So, fun fact, my demense includes Constantinople, but, for reasons, I have my capital parked over in Adrianopolis. So for a while I could park my spymaster in Constantinople which I controlled.