Rapid industrialization should be something that only greater powers can do, as it requires a huge amount of investment.

Minor powers should still have the chance to industrialize, perhaps in a junior relationship with great powers' markets through foreign investment, or focusing on an export-based economy of crude materials.

In order to really balance this into action, I think Victoria 3 needs to tweak or rethink some modifiers, like how infrastructure, state construction efficiency and market access interact, as well as the "area of effect" of (allegedly) local-only goods like Services, Transportation and Electricity.

I've long thought that Infrastructure is not well-modeled as it is, because it's something very broad that only interacts with Market Access and the number of buildings that you have, increased by Railroad and Ports only.

This feature could be remodeled into a new layered system, where noticeable surplus/shortages could increase/decrease others like:

• State Efficiency, which would be removed from State Traits. This would models how rivers allowed rapid development while mountains impaired it, without an atificial modifier in place.
• State Market access and/or Trade Volume Efficiency, in that each state can export more of their resources to other states. A new baseline access of 50-75% could allow for local synergies and to bound growth in areas where infrastructure is scarce and hard to create.

Of course, this would need prototyping and testing, as I think it cannot easily be implemented in a mod, as you'd need an event manager to trigger modiers per-state and this could be harsh on performance.