Did you ever actually poll the player base to come up with that conclusion? Because drawing conclusions from the anecdotes of some people complaining on this forum is a poor substitute. For one thing, people are always more vocal when it comes to complaining than they are otherwise. For another, I've only seen between ten and twenty people complaining about food anyway.
Personally, I enjoy food trading. I enjoy playing the market, attempting to maximise my profits. The only problem I have with this current system is that it chains Lords to their regions, unable to leave for fear of neglecting their food distribution duties. I think that enabling trade transactions regardless of character location would solve this problem entirely. I don't see the act of placing food offers as being cumbersome in the least, however I would welcome automation of it, so long as it still allowed willing players (such as myself) to continue manually managing buy and sell offers. I like Dante's proposal, as it is simple yet effective.
People who are harmed by the system are more likely to complain, not people who dislike it in general. Hence the problem: all of the rural lords who just don't give a damn. Which is the biggest problem with "there needs to be responsibilities for the rewards": the lords with the responsibilities don't feel the pain for their failures, it's the lords without the food surpluses that do.
I enjoy trade... as long as there's trading to be done. I don't enjoy seeing a bunch of the food rot because the rural lords don't care for profits and another chunk just getting shipped to NPCs to avoid their wrath, despite general reductions in food production and deletion of mass portion of the food stocks.
Then there's all these talks about forcing realms to get more traders... but who'd want to become a trader when there are no damn sell offers on the continent? You just walk and walk and walk and never do any actual trading.
