I think everybody agrees that axis has an advantage ; we would not bid otherwise :)
And remember, at the beginning here, people were bidding to get the allies !
If I remember well, average bid in revised was around 7-9 (but I almost did not play this scenario online, so I might be wrong). I’m not sure this was so much unbalanced.
The 41 version begins with a lot of battle - thus dices - on round 1. That makes the bid less relevent again on a particular game, since that can be totally wiped out by bad dices. But I believe something between 6 and 12 should be a good conclusion in the future (as I’m trying to predict, the interval is bigger :) ). Which would be an average / high bid according to where the conclusion leads, but still not an unbelievable gap imho.