But the trader is not just "for helping neighbors" surely. It's to help yourself too. When you need a good isn't the first thing you do to check to see what trades for it are available?
I long ago reached a point where I never "need a good". I keep at least 300K of each in stock(usually 800k), and when I dip below that in say scrolls, then I might check what offers are up, but usually, I just post 100K silk for 100k scrolls 7-8x and the trades get filled over the next 48h.
Soggy, I'm trying to understand the problem with the trader. for me it works fine. I don't even know what sentient goods are.
Goods of the same tier (like planks, marble, steel) are all of equal value, and later in the game it is very easy to get a huge stash. This meant that I could blindly take any same-tier trade, regardless of my boost or stockpile. It didn't matter if I went from 1m of each to 1.2m, 1.4m, 600K, because I could just post 3-4 big trades and it would balance out eventually.
Sentient goods are a special case though. For one, they decay at a rate of 10% per night making it much harder to build up a stockpile.
They also require another special resource to make: divine seeds which are limited. On top of that, the factories that make them are virtually useless 7 months of the year for players at the end of the research tree waiting for a new chapter. This means you don't want to build a bunch of them, just what you need which is 1 single factory.
All of that adds up to sentient goods being rather precious and if you accidentally take a trade that doesn't help you, you might not get a trade that can reverse it for a few days.
To balance this and make the trading of sentient goods possible with only a small portion of the playerbase in chapters 12+, the devs made sentient trades global. This means that every player in chapter 12+ can see every single sentient post from everyone once you unlock them in the tech tree.
Since trades are listed in order of size, my trades available are normal, normal, crosstier, sentient, normal, crosstier, sentient, etc for 67 pages. I have to stop and think about the sentients, and avoid the crosstier, so I don't even bother anymore.
Edit: I just waded through all of that crap, and took every same-tier trade except sentients, and there are 61 pages left of the 67 I started with. So, the trader is 90% crap, and that is why players like me often don't find your 500 plank for steel trades