I want power to rest with the landed nobles.
That's a nice idea, but doesn't seem to work in practice. In my experience, most region lords don't see this as having power, they see it as an extra chore they have put up with.
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.
