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So essentially "Create Undead" is a useless spell that should never under any circumstances be used. As at CL 11 you can only raise Ghouls which are CR 1 creatures, which with only 13 HP (they don't even have DR) would be destroyed in 1 hit in any CR appropriate encounter for the party, thereby wasting your 100 GP investment vs. at CL 8 my party killed a few cyclops and I animated them into bloody skeletons which are CR 6 with the template, they have a nice juicy 85 HP (10HD +2 per HD from charisma and +2 per HD from casting near an altar with a desecrate spell), DR 5/Bludgeoning, fast healing 5, and unless destroyed by holy forces (unlikely in my campaign) they come back to unlife in 1 hour if destroyed, meaning that my investment of 500 GP is never wasted. Even if you rule that 5 Ghouls could be raised from the corpse of 1 Cyclops (10 HD per cyclops/2 HD per Ghoul) which would technically make them CR 5.5 altogether and also cost 500 GP, but as we all know it is always much easier to kill many of a very weak thing than it is to kill only 1 of a much stronger thing. And even if the Ghouls were able to manage to make a passable threat to your enemies, many of them would be destroyed every encounter creating a never ending money sink.
As far as ease of control goes, it is much, much easier to control a mindless undead, you give them a command and they do it, plain and simple, if you have an evil GM they may force you to specify your exact wording, and punish you if the exact wording results in something you don't want, but then you just have to make sure your commands are clear and concise. Giving such a command is a free action as all it requires is speech.
Intelligent undead are a problem from day 1, first you have to either cast the command undead spell or use the command undead feat to bring them under your control. If you use the command undead spell you will be constantly rolling opposed charisma checks to get them to so much as shuffle their feet, ability checks are generally considered to be standard actions. Essentially in order for you to get them to be effective on a battle field you will be arguing with them every round of battle instead of casting buffs, debuffs, and engaging in battle yourself. Using the feat, the undead gets a save to throw off its bonds of slavery every day, and if your GM is evil they will choose the worst opportunity for this save to be made (like in your sleep, or in the middle of a challenging combat) after which the undead will almost certainly try to kill you (you specifically, they will probably ignore your party unless they get in the way)
All of this so they can have they ability to use magic items, but why in the world would you equip what essentially amounts to cannon fodder with extremely expensive equipment? If they had any amount of UMD or spellcasting ability, I could see this as a worthy investment and hand them a wand, but otherwise, it is much better to keep the magic items in the hands of the PCs. I would instead invest a much smaller amount of money in equipping my skeleton cyclops with a Mwk Breastplate and a Mwk Greataxe and calling it a day.
About the only way this spell makes sense is that the intelligent undead can technically gain class levels, but even this is shaky as they would unlikely be spending much energy on improving themselves while chaffing under your commands. Even if you got a friendly GM to say sure, lets train those Ghouls up a bit, with your party being at 11th level it will take a long time for that Ghoul to be a formidable threat, and will likely die in combat long before that time, unless you decide to keep it in the back of combat until it is ready, I suppose you would avoid all those pesky opposed charisma checks for a while.
To put simply this allegedly superior spell isn't superior at all, and it makes little sense mechanically speaking or Roleplaying-wise. Mechanically a 6th level spell should be an improvement on a 3rd level spell, if a comparable one exists, and in the case of create dead vs animate dead, create dead clearly loses. Roleplaying-wise, it seems that undead created via animate dead retain much more of their past-life abilities than one created via create dead, even after stripping a whole bunch of abilities off via the template a few things remain for your skeleton, such as its size, strength, dexterity (gets a small boost for sloughing off all those extra pounds), its weapon and armor proficiencies, its HD, its general anatomy, its movement speeds (including dig, climb, swim, and in some cases fly), it even keeps a few special qualities if they improve melee or ranged attacks. While if you cast create undead on a creature such as an Ancient Red Dragon and decide to create a ghoul out of it, you end up with the colossal carcass either transforming into a medium sized humanoid, or splitting into several medium sized humanoids, losing all of its natural attacks, losing its fly speed, losing all of its spellcasting ability, getting new ability scores that have absolutely no relation to its original ability scores, etc, etc, etc. At best the only thing that "might" remain from the creature's lifetime is its memories, but if you really want to interrogate the dead for information they might know there is another 3rd level spell, Speak with Dead, that is much more effective. I really don't know what the author of this spell or perhaps the author of the monster entries was thinking, in order for this to be a good spell casting option at all this spell should have either raised intelligent undead more on par with the caster's level, ghouls at level 11 are just worthless, or the monster entries should have been templates similar to the skeleton and zombie entries allowing the players to create powerful undead allies, a ghoulish cyclops might actually be fun to have in the party and worth the pains of controlling it, while a plain old ghoul is just a nuisance and a hulking bloody skeleton standing as a silent sentinel over the party as they sleep is really kinda creepy, even if it is an amazing combatant.