And you end up with situations like in Kindara, where a Duchess is apparently logging in enough to not auto-pause, but refuses to answer messages or appoint a lord to one of her rurals for more than a month. There's 1000 bushels of food stuck in that rural with no way to get it out while her city starves, and the duchess can't even be banned because she's a royal.
I apparently missed the part where anything is bad or needs change...