The latest blog post about trade got me to thinking about the very real challenge it posed; both sides made strong arguments, whether having a free trade speculation system (with no market adaptation) results in the player finding a profitable route and grinding the crap out of it, being boring, versus whether having a non-speculative system with windfall opportunities and market gluts kicks you when you're down by limiting or denying you any opportunity to get back on your feet, being frustrating.
I then considered the fact that in reality, the vast majority of cargo on the roads on Earth is completely non-speculative, being transshipped.
We know them as Fed Ex quests, and we generally hate them when they're the sole form of gameplay, but there are exceptions -- the Taxi missions throughout the Grand Theft Auto 3D series have been nothing short of hilariously fun, and Euro Truck Simulator (2, too) is based on nothing other than shipping other people's stuff where it needs to go. I actually found being a United Shipping courier in EV: Nova to be one of the most fun Fed Ex styles of gameplay in any game, since there's such a huge element of "oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, there's a fleet battle that I'm stuck in the middle of, oh crap, oh crap, gah, railgun, oh crap, oh crap, phew, made it away" when you have few appreciable weapons and are dodging the firing solutions of two meeting forces as nothing other than an unfortunate collateral. The time pressure certainly never hurt, although it was a "jump" pressure unlike Star-far-ector since its clock didn't tick over except on landing or jumping, so it was basically how to manage your routes efficiently, taking assignments where the pickup point would be the same as the destination for another assignment you had already taken, and so forth.
In short, if we're going to focus on a more realistic speculative cargo system which relies on shortages and surpluses to be profitable/available, since it appears we're not interested in a Patrician III style of free market trading system, I feel as though we should also represent the other element of reality: freelance owner-operator shipments. Space truckers, yo.
