That was never the case in any of the realms I was in. There were always special circumstances that demanded manual intervention(drought, looting etc.). In my opinion that's how it should be with resources. Once set up, things chug along nicely until something goes wrong. Only then is player attention needed.
And I think that this is probably around the place we would like things to get back to, too. Maybe it won't be exactly the same, but I don't believe the
intention with the changes to the food system has ever been to increase the
minimum complexity for the players: only to increase the
maximum complexity—that is, to offer more options for those who really want to dig into them.
