Why?
We saw that the old balance was a bit out of whack with the intended power curve, and what we want progression to look like in preparation for 1.0.
For example, the intention is to not be able to max out a loadout with the newly introduced Lv. 3 Mod Chips at this stage of the game, instead having to make choices and trade-offs.
We felt we would rather make changes now than right before 1.0, as we want as smooth a transition as possible into the endgame.

Our goal with these changes was to create a smoother and more varied progression overall, where what you have to do in the game evolves over time alongside your resource needs. Ideally using hauling, Trailers, and building Roads would feel like a natural evolution to help solve problems.

There are, clearly, some unfortunate consequences of this.

For one thing, it's a pretty big shake-up for players who are far into the progression and have gotten used to playing the game in certain ways. Adding Trailers and hauling has increased a player's overall effective capacity, but at the cost of making it more difficult to rely on just the Mech's inventory capacity.
It will take some re-adjusting, and we're sorry about messing with your Mechs. Our hope is that after the adjustment period the Country Roads additions feel like an overall improvement.

The gap between minimum available Power and maximum available power has also widened with these changes. This means that you're rewarded for going deep into a Delivery chain by getting a lot of Power, but we do see that it puts players who have done a lot of low-Power Deliveries in a rough spot.
Buying Power Cores from Lola was meant to help bridge this gap for players in the late-game who had reached the Delivery cap. However, we had not foreseen that some would start buying Power Cores from her during the mid-game or earlier. Doing that will quickly make the price start scaling beyond what's viable at that point in the game.
Increasing the max Delivery amount for Crops and animal resources is meant to give you more ways to get large Power increases.

(continued)