This statement is very narrow minded. It looks at one specific case on a continent. Here's the reason: The way that this system works is that it is highly likely that ONLY buy offers will be on the market, or ONLY sale offers will be on the market in the steady state long term. Quite simply if the rural lords are more engaged, then there will be more sell offers as city lords only need to fill the orders themselves and not place their own. If the city lords are more engaged there will be a lot of buy offers, and the rural lords can simply fill.
This is the obvious outcome of the current system if lords want to maximize their gold gain. They can cut out the middleman of a trader by doing so themselves. However, it takes more effort.
For instance, my experience with the system on Atamara was that there were never any buy offers in my area. Only sell offers. Which worked great because I'm lord of a city.
Each geographic trading area will tend towards one of the extremes after it has been in practice long term. (Current system)
In any case, there's still none of one type of offer, though a lack of buy offers is better as you know that some people will be manually doing the purchases anyways and you can set up your sell offers in consequence.
In any case, I found trade much more enjoyable back when everything was automated, and had much more success trading, both in food surplus and deficit realms on different continents.
