3 months ago these hybrid economies didn't exist. This is a unique mechanic to player economies and wasn't in place initially. We couldn't have known about something nobody had ever seen. We're playing with a whole new rulebook that still doesn't match the rules the NPCs use.
Hybrid economies have been in the game from the beginning in 2014 and the ones we get in our colonies closely match their behaviour for which commodities appear and disappear at various levels of hybridisation. This is exactly the same underlying problem as the old "why are Source HE Suits missions so difficult?" just applied to something you can't Inara-search your way out of.
The way in which you
construct an economy with X% refinery and Y% industrial and Z% agricultural differs from the NPC version quite substantially, yes (and differs from the version in the original colonisation release substantially, too). But the behaviour of the economy once it has those proportions is basically identical to how an NPC economy would behave in terms of which commodities it produces and which ones it consumes - to the extent that the tool I've built to predict how an economy with particular proportions behaves can be built entirely on data collected from NPC stations and still get it almost exactly right for colonisation stations (there are some issues due to low sample sizes on some commodities, but only a few).
Nothing in what is happening with weak links (or the earlier hybrid things people were building before Update 3 by other means) is any surprise at all to me. Sure, it's been a surprise to a lot of other people who didn't go around in 2018-19 looking at how NPC economies actually worked. I'm not blaming players for not knowing this stuff, because there was no reason they needed to until three months ago. But the outcome was nevertheless extremely predictable for the few of us who did look at this stuff, which is why I spent the entire time between Frontier's original "we're going to make something like weak links" post and them actually doing it two months later describing it as a "threat", and trying (largely unsuccessfully) to warn people it was coming and not to get attached to their previous system economies.
It'd make sense to have tiers maybe 10, 25, 50, 75, 100% for demand.
This is already basically the case.
Some commodities have production which generally exceeds consumption. Those can come through as production (and therefore suppress consumption) even from a very small weak link.
Some commodities have consumption which generally exceeds production. Those can come through as consumption (and therefore suppress production) even from a very small weak link. (HE Suits being the classic example)
Others have the two be basically the same. Those will be produced if their producing component is in the majority.
Most commodities also - intentionally, to add variety and make it so that every station isn't a perfect clone of every other - have ranges in their production and consumption rates. Often quite big ranges - so one station might produce ten times the fish but a quarter of the animal meat of another, even though their overall economic size is the same. This
is the one bit which differs slightly between NPC and colonisation stations, in that the NPC positions on the ranges appear to be random but fixed, whereas the colonisation positions seem to be at least in part functions of the system variables like Wealth which we can ourselves update ... though treating them as random within a range even for colonisation is probably
safer in practice since we know too little about the precise details of what Wealth+1 will do and you can't plan a build based on it
Then on top of that you've got BGS state effects, which don't usually apply the same state multipliers to production and to consumption. So it's possible for commodities closer to the borderline to be produced in some BGS state combinations and consumed in others. (Obviously, with colonies generally being low player activity systems, we're mostly interested in what the State:None behaviour is this time)
