Provision house conversion is not very favorable, but I did not find cakes were hard to come by. I could see why people would have trouble if they were trying to trade for the resources, but it did not seem necessary to me. If the goal is to encourage trading, this is not going to do it, though.
I think it might be interesting, in some aspects, to play from the beginning again. I think the biggest problem would be having missed all those previous events and thus no way of getting a lot of specialists other than gems.
General with +200% XP and natural bounty hunter sounds useful.