after AW, yes. before AW, no. well, Themis is a good princess if you don't have one, but generally you'd at least want sherry or lilia for princess.
as for the gold armor thing, you can try pm-ing nutaku on fb, but like I said, they DID warn players to stop their games 5min before.
as for Horus and charlotte comparison, you can compare them yourself here: http://millenniumwaraigis.wikia.com/...:Magic_Fencers
those stats/skills are after patch, so they're inaccurate currently but eventually we'll reach the point where the stats will be the same as the jp version.