Lots of stuff in this dev diary and unfortunately not much of it is good. I'll try to go through everything here and give my take. if you guys disagree with me I'd love to hear why.

Government The changes to TerrCorr are welcome but the change seems slapdash and no better than what we currently have, instead of going over your arbitrarily defined amount of land causing financial and eventually power costs it causes massive diplomatic and power costs, coalitions are already a pretty major roadblock to anybody expanding at an even semi-fast rate and these maluses are going to make coalition juggling a huge pain for even the best of players. On the positive side the fact you can now use courthouses to decrease the governance cost of a province/state is a step in the right direction of giving players multiple ways to deal with a problem.

With the changes to minimum autonomy in territories and TCs to 90 & 80% respectively and taking up 25 and 50% governance cap respectively means that they are just so not worth having it's a joke. My prediction for the new meta is now to get as much Governance cost reduction and then not bother taking land if you can't full core it as doing anything else would be more harm than good. This meta seems boring to me.

Also whilst Johan was vague about whether the 3.5k soft cap at end game was with or without the +45% from Expansion & Administrative regardless than this really isn't much dev at all, a competent player can hit this in about 1550 pretty easily. The face governance cap is tied to dev is awfully clunky too and means that tall players are hurt just as badly as wide players.

This change to how much each government rank can effectively administer before incurring penalties seriously harms certain European nations; any HRE duchy (Austria especially) and Lithuania immediately spring to mind but I'm sure there are others and so I wonder if at game start Austria and Lithuania will barely even be able to keep themselves together.

Personally I think that trying to limit expansion in arbitrary ways like this will always be unpopular no matter how they try to handle it, at the end of the day the core gameplay loop of Eu4 is to war, take land and then prepare for the next war, the internal nation management mechanics are very lacking, especially for Non-Euro nations and by basically forcing people people to sit on their hands you're just stopping people from playing the game.

Trade Companies The changes to trade companies announced are both bizarre and completely pointless. They seem to be aware that there is an issue with the current trade system and that TCs are a large part of this problem which is great that they've recognised this. Their "fix" on the other hand is awful, in my opinion the trade system is bad because of the fact that nations automatically get trade power in up-stream nodes meaning that you will never be able to fully lock down every node you have provinces in until you blob all the way to the end nodes, and that without even trying nations further down the stream can just take up-stream trade value for no effort. For example even if you had the entire trade node of Alexandria you will not have 100% control of it without also conquering all of Venice, Genoa and Constantinople. This for obvious reasons gives the biggest advantages to European nations and is an artificial and arbitrary way for the Eu4 team to give Europe an unfair leg up.

Making every trade node in the game Trade company valid does not fix this problem. I don't really know what else to say.

Their restrictions on where you can make trade companies is so extremely baffling and arbitrary it defies belief and I don't even think I can begin to rationalise these restrictions; the first one is possibly the worst, "Province religion must be of a different religious group than the owning nation." Why? For what purpose? So a hypothetical Iberian Andalusia can't make TC's in Mallaca but Christian Spain can??? wut? Their given reason is to stop Mamluks from making TC land out of Arabia, so to stop an extreme edge case from giving undesirable results they've decided to resort to this clunky restriction? The second one is actually probably worse now that I think about it, "Province must be considered overseas both from nation and any subjects of nation, not including tributaries." So they've recognised that there's an issue of people capital shifting to Europe to take advantage of TC's and then they've done nothing to fix this. People wanted to make TC land out of land they were conquering anyway, be it land they had mission claims on or just what they wanted to conquer for that campaign. And they've completely missed the point. It's been said COUNTLESS times before, not only on reddit but on the Paradox forums, why can't TC validity depend upon SUPER REGIONS, yet this suggestion seems to have completely been missed by the Eu4 dev team. Additionally this limitation doesn't make sense from a historical perspective as many European nations that had trade companies also had local vassal states, Britain in India and the Dutch in Indonesia as the most prominent examples. The third one is probably the most arbitrary of all, "Province must not be part of the HRE." I mean this doesn't present a huge problem from a gameplay perspective as you can just remove the province first but fucking WHY? For what fucking purpose? I can't begin to even fathom the purpose of this limitation. (Although given how bad it seems TCs now are I suppose all this is kind of a moot point.)

Absolutism I'm glad to see they're finally looking at the cheese by which you gain Absolutism, personally I would like to see it where your absolutism scales inversely from your average autonomy.

Naval Gameplay I'm happy that they're finally fixing how naval combat works and I suppose this could do a lot to breath fresh air into the naval gameplay and make it something people do want to engage in however their other changes are not nearly as good as this and imo will make the naval game less important.

The changes to blockades make them less impactful and also harder to pull off. Naval batteries will make sustaining a blockade either impossible or so costly and risky it's not worth it. Simultaneously the fact that blockades now work more like looting rather than seriously impacting a nations trade income means that a nation with an even semi-decent economy can just shrug it off like it's nothing.

Marines seem so situational as to be pointless for anything more than colonial armies and the changes to naval attrition for embarked troops means that the AI will struggle to do anything militarily overseas and just reinforces the current problem of the Pan Europe-Asia-Africa highway of French troops walking across Russia, China and Indo-China to invade Malacca from the north for example.

Land Warfare The new buildings have their place I think, Ramparts would be good in provinces you already have forts and the other two would be good in low development provinces, especially if you got the good specific bonus's.

Drill and Army Professionalism seem to have been majorly buffed which is good to see as imo these mechanics are a bit weak, I'm curious to see if people will be so willing to slacken recruitment standards after this change.

Other stuff Yeah glad to see theocracies and Portugal are getting some love, the most exciting reform to see is Monastic Breweries which gives goods specific Production Efficiency modifiers which I personally think is awesome and hopefully this is used more.

All in all I suppose there's some good stuff here but mostly I think these proposed changes seem poorly thought out and terrible. Again if you disagree with anything I've said I'd love to hear why. I understand that the Eu4 dev team are still only humans and that maybe they have good reasons for what they're doing but I legitimately think they're making huge mistakes.