How odd, folk hauled more in their Cutters / T9's each, on average, than the average are doing in a CG being lambasted as P2W... Some forum members are not going to like that particular statistic!
The previous record holder was a very substantial outlier, though. Compared with normal previous trade CGs the average tonnage is almost doubled.
It'll be interesting to see what this looks like after a few more rounds of trade CGs, but it certainly seems right now that we can look forward to the
next "haul lots of stuff" task having a much higher tonnage requirement than it would have previously.
(Interestingly, there is essentially no correlation between the number of participants and the average tonnage per participant - the CG can be a niche interest for a couple of thousand participants or it can attract over tens of thousands, but it seems to take a representative "slice" out of the population either way in terms of distribution of activity)
There's likely some psychology involved. Something along the lines of "I can transport more with this ship, therefore I need to do less trips"... and it ends up them indeed making less trips and, ironically, transporting less in total than with a smaller ship.
Also, importantly, the previous record CG for average participation only gave out the reward for top 75%, with no partial prize for top 100%, so there was more incentive at the low end to haul a small but "more than one trip" amount, which brings up the average tonnage. Only one of the others above 10,000 average had a "top 100%" reward at all, and that also had a "top 50%" reward.