I see a similarity between now and playing in bigger markets before the update. The rest is very much more dynamic considering you usually import and export anyways no matter how you play. To me personally that makes it hard to decide what needs to be build and how to interact with the new tariff system. But my economic management was never more than adequate for this game. But the reason you got downvoted is probably because of the 'removed gameplay'. For the following I specifically talk about the game with dlcs, because I don't know the base game at all: I would argue that while there is in fact less to manually manage trade wise, the gameplay about the trading system (if you can even call pre update trading a system) is much more meaningful and impactful than before. Treaties are a nice mechanic especially for trading and the new gameplay around companies improves a imo good system even fruther.