A few months ago Stephen Chenault mentioned that they are planning to release a "Castles & Crusades Basic Set", which will be a boxed set with softcover rulebooks, ala the old D&D Basic and Expert boxes. He stated this in response to a question on Reddit asking if there was ever going to be a "Castles & Crusades Lite" type of game, as the current hardback rulebooks are rather dense.
I would imagine that a Castles & Crusades Basic Set would involve truncated rules which might be easier to grok than what's in the current C&C rulebooks. It may even have new and different rules, in the same way that Basic D&D is very similar but still somewhat different than AD&D. As a fan of rules-lite games, I hope this is the case. I would definitely buy a C&C Basic boxed set with stripped-down rules.