Elhoim
Iron Tower Studio Dev
You can be annoyed as you want
Thank you! For both times you said it

but your notion of fun is personal and not shared with everyone
Heck, that was my whole point, that fun is not an objective measure, but many times is presented as such (this design is "fun").
Anyway, I totally agree that the main and logical point of such a big game company is to cater to what most of the people think it's fun for them, and also with most of the points you made, especially regarding some challenges that actually "feel wrong", based more on some poorly implementation.
BTW, I should be more clear about something: It's not about making it harder what I was talking about, but with more nuance and complexity in regards to how to achieve benefits. Personally, what I like is games with "check and balances", in which going too much into a direction gives drawbacks in other ones, and I find the fun in finding a sweet spot. When something is "Here you have all these benefits!" even when I do understand that there IS some balance in the opportunity cost, I don't find them much fun or sometimes the opportunity cost is really not that big or balanced. For example, using the great merchant. You can use some charges, and there's also a slew of them that were really not that good, so it's really not much a choice when using one to get a couple of envoys or founding a corporation.
In any case, this mode IS quite well designed. It has some logical limitations, but the main thing I disliked was that it adds a lot of yields for a game already overflowing with yields without some kind of yield counterbalance gameplay.