@NodusC: Intellectual dishonesty? I am sorry but if that is what you think then you are way off base. Trading in X-games has never at a big picture level been about "if" you can acquire money in-game. Some trades you may make profit (with careful consideration massive profit), others you may make a loss or just break even but it has rarely been an exercise in gambling. You may try to deny it, but gazumping of trades does cause issues with AI controlled (and looped point-to-point) trading under certain circumstances.
My comment about forum account age and linking it to game experience is based on the fact that most new forum members are new to the game. You claimed that something is not the case that definitely is, which gives further weight to the assumption that you are relatively new to the series. There is nothing wrong with that, and it is not a case of derogatory "noob" critique that is unfortunately common in the MMO crowd (though I can see how someone might take it that way).
None of us know everything about the game, and depending on how each of us play it we may each encounter different experiences. Just because any one of us encounter a given issue does not mean everyone else will encounter the same situation, that does not mean the issue in question does/did not exist.
Yes, X-Rebirth is a different game in many ways from the X-Trilogy (no-one argues that is it not) but while things have changed quite substantially in form the general "spirit" of the game (for want of a better term) has not in the main.
Trading in X-Rebirth works pretty much the same as it did in previous games, nothing has been removed per se. The main difference being that while the space may feel bigger in essence there are less stations thus less spread in the trading web which obviously gives the impression of less competition for the production of certain goods.
This does of course make it harder for the player to muscle in as the primary supplier of any given goods but to me that was never a core feature of an X-game.
I enjoy trading. I enjoyed the myriad of problems I had to solve and how some of them required more, or less, levels of direct interaction. How there was variation between difficulty of solving trade routes and how managing a solution without tanking faction reputation, due to pushing out competing traders, was a part of that.
All of that is removed. We're left with a bare-bones trading system when compared to X3 that doesn't actually improve upon the dynamics that were left behind.
What you have complained about specifically in the quoted points would possibly be addressed in part by option 1 in the OP's poll.
The claims that "things were removed" is the bit that probably gets most people's goat. In essence, nothing has been removed it is just that X-Rebirth is basically representing a universe that is re-emerging from a prolonged period of fragmentation of the original factions (and isolation of the new factions from each other). The implications of this is that the well established inter-dependent cross-universe economy that was present in X3 is no longer there and as a result the nature of how the player interacts with it has changed.
If you were expecting the same level of economic interaction between all the different factions in X-Rebirth that we had in X3 then you seem to have ignored (at least part of) the primary lore aspects behind X-Rebirth.
The universe economy situation may be different in the sequel to X-Rebirth or perhaps will be mutated/extended in a patch/DLC but other than that there is always the potential for a mod to be developed that facilitates the degree of economic interaction you seem to be looking for.
In short, trading in X-Rebirth is more localised and flow of trade is not restricted/facilitated by a vast network of gates (which the player could alter via the Xenon Hub in X3:TC/X3:AP). This means certain challenges that perhaps had to be overcome in previous games to achieve certain goals using certain approaches are no longer a factor but in their place there are other considerations.
The network of Highways in any given cluster is the main focus of trade routes (to coin your term) but where the bulk of trading is concerned those highways are largely irrelevant as the larger trade ships can boost between zones in the same sector (and jump directly to an adjacent sector with-in the same cluster). In X-Rebirth (as with all the X-Trilogy games), it is proximity of stations that dictate preferred trading targets in the main not specific trade routes.
With Jump Gates and jump drives as they stand, personally I have concerns that increased trans-jump-gate traffic will cause other problems due to the speed with which the AI currently navigates through the jump gates.
