While I see your point, I am somewhat sympathetic toward topcat too - I think y'all (meaning not you in particular) are reading things into prophetic visions that may well not be there.
What was seen by Ezekiel/Daniel and etc. may have been precisely what they reported. In fact, it quite probably was. It was a vision. It was not needfully a birds-eye view of a future time. It may have been a rendering that the Spirit knew the man could understand, that if he wrote it down faithfully, we would be able to understand as well.
Prophecy is seldom predictive. It usually cannot be fully understood until it has been fulfilled. At the very time of it's fulfillment, those who are awake can see, at least can feel the season as it is happening, but most will not understand until after the event has occurred.
But in the eyes of the prophet, he may well have seen horsemen, with "thundering noises", and the sound of "rushing waters"... He didn't have to understand what it all meant... In fact they normally didn't understand the end times stuff. What he had to do was write it down faithfully.
What we have to do is apply the vision to history, and see if it is completely fulfilled. Jehovah's Word does not return to him empty, so if the prophecy is not perfectly fulfilled, it is not the fulfillment, and we await the truth of the prophecy.
But even if the vision was "just" a vision, and not foreknowledge of the battle scenes themselves, That takes nothing away from it's veracity.
"Horsemen" can still easily be translated into "Cavalry". In fact, that is probably as close as a literal translation can get to a term that we would clearly understand. Our Armored Cavalry perform the same function as horsemen would all those years ago. "Blood up to the horse's bridles" does not necessitate a horse. It is a measurement that we can certainly quantify.
Soldiers are still soldiers, armor is still armor, and while a sword is no longer used, the gist of the vision, that the soldiers are heavily armed and armored with the best of everything comes through very clearly. It is neat, btw, that armor is back on the job, as prophecy predicted it even though we have been hundreds of years without it.
While I agree most firmly with the idea that the very end of things is near, I also agree in (small) part with the preterist view. The Scriptures say that the end times began in the times of the Apostles. One must take that broad a view in order to see, as what the Bible calls the "Time of the End" has been running for 2000 years, and the prophecy has been unfolding all along.
Where I think we are now is entering, or having already entered the "Time of Jacob's Troubles", which is within a generation of the end, which is what most folks call the "end times".
How long is this generation, and when did the time start?