About the industry changes: A suspicious mind would say that the changes have more to do with throttling cloud computing expenses than anything else. Players are building way more and bigger mega factories than what was perhaps predicted.
Making industry drastically more expensive and more inflexible than this far certainly makes it very difficult area to play (or is it already then more like work and no fun?). Recurring argument from JC (if I got it correctly) is to promote co-op, civilization building and all that. However applying this logic has been very one-sided this far. It seems that if there is a difficulty in real life then bring it to the game - jay it's now more realistic. But positive things from real life are missing from the game. Things that are essential for any kind of co-op to work, for any financial system to work, for logistics to work, and to have integration benefits : we would so direly need working contracting system, banks and banking, ability to exchange goods for quantas and quantas for goods at any location not just in markets for making logistics a bit more sensible.. (in real life truckers bring goods to factories, factory owner does not fetch the raw materials from markets), even insurance systems (maybe blackboxes in ships which can prove ship was shot down and not just wrecked by owner, of course this kind of list could go on and on, but my point is that there exists almost nothing co-op supportive currently. Only markets.
And yet a bit about the markets. Because volumes (both player volume and volumes of goods produced by players) are so low prices are unstable. I have heard from few players that because this price instability they have preferred to build the whole chain from ores to final product in their factories and not buy intermediate products from markets + availability from markets can be very iffy. In theory you could handle the variable price issue with good RL-kind IT systems (each individual item individually priced throughout the whole factory) but who is mad enough to try to write such thing as a LUA script in a game with many artificial obstacles to overcome.
