I agree that we can't make sweeping changes based on one island. But we also can't let things stagnate everywhere because trade may be working right for one city on one island.
Unfortunately we don't have a good baseline. Dwilight got overloaded with food for so long that there were literally hundreds of thousands of bushels available and all reals were producing surpluses, EC has a lot of burned regions, FEI has broken trade distances, and AT has two very large allied blocks. No island is "typical" or has a varied enough state to really be called average.
