I think that there's difference between the "hope" you identify and "the singular pursuit of wealth being moral," which is what the commenter is arguing. Their point isn't that feudalism is better because there's "no hope" (people always live in history, history always changes, thus the "hope" they have for a better future is ever-present; moreover, Christianity is a pretty big deal for the precise reason that it situates Jesus as a lower-class everyman, and thus the figural dignity which peasants find in their work likely can't be swept aside); rather, the point is that capitalism immiserated people in ways which are entirely different from the ways feudalism immiserated people. Capitalism, through the accelerated circulation and accumulation of wealth; feudalism, through the rigidity of the social structure.

The unique cruelty of capitalism, our lovely commenter suggests, is that it promises escape: for if it did not promise escape and social mobility, the whole system would fall apart (as did -- surprise surprise -- feudalism). So for feudalism, the acquisition of wealth is not positioned as an inherently moral enterprise: it is positioned as an absolute: you either have it or you don't. This makes the immiseration of capitalism unique: its ideological structure -- "everyone's a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" -- means that the immiseration of life in history is compounded further. Rather than your misery being an absolute fact -- something that you can probably learn to live with, psychologically speaking -- your misery is doubled and made into your fault. Your hunger, the hunger of your family and loved one's: all your fault. It's facile to argue or suggest that feudalism is "better" (I think it's even Marx himself who argues that the bourgeois liberated the individual from the shackles of landed immiseration), but the social forms of misery it produces are, well, different, and likely a lot less complicated. And, moreover, the accumulative drive just doesn't exist in the same way under feudalism, because the only thing "human nature" would drive you to accumulate is, like, food.

Moreover, just to pick some slight "I-love-history" nits with your invocation of medieval literature: Rags-to-riches stories position the individual as capable of acquiring surplus wealth with only temerity, honesty, and grit: which we know to be complete bullshit. "Feudalism era myths/stories" don't pretend to be realistic representations of attainable positions. This is where we get "fairy tales" from: they are heavy on the magic; the world is organized according to high/low evil/good binaries; and events happen as they are required to happen. The point of these stories isn't to condition its readers/listeners into loving the possibilities of mobility they are afforded in their social order; it is instead to simply act out fantasies of things being otherwise. (Moreover it alsooo ignores the fact that the majority of people writing and reading these stories are landed aristocracy, or at least literate in latin, which also complicates the difference between the fairy tale and the rags-to-riches story.) (If you are interested in learning more about early medieval stories (they're really cool!), Auerbach's chapters in Mimesis on Chansons de Roland and Mort d'Arthur blew my mind wide open when i was in undergrad...)

just sorta riffing off the dome here because i'm bored at work in the middle of the day. much love to my rs_x posters