Trade hub development: Where to send merchants?

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   At this point, as long as private city-to-city trade remains viable, regional trade will be a non starter.
As I write this let's say I need basic swords.  There are currently 41 different sellers available to me, and over 60k swords on sale for prices I would consider paying.  More than 50k of those are on the market in Centrum.  Twelve of the 41 sellers are using the market at Centrum.  There are nine sellers closer to me than Centrum but many of those are charging higher prices, so there is little incentive for me to buy from them.

I think that until trade distances are sharply limited (I believe at some point the devs were going to limit city to city trading to 100 square radius, but I could be mistaken) there won't be any economical reason to use a hub.  People buy for the price factor balanced by the convenience factor, meaning that the cheapest offer within the range I'm willing to travel.

Even if trading distance becomes limited, Centrum still has such a foothold that for economic reasons it will be the primary hub.  If most players decide to only use their one free traders they will want to send him to the place where most other players are trading.  Centrum is the ideal choice with its central location and heavy traffic.  The best argument for regional hubs that I can see is for internal trade within alliances that have a strong regional focus.  I will use the Dark Star Dominion as an example since I am their neighbor and I can see some of the hubs they use:

Bandarius = 12 basic res, 5 advanced res, 34 crafting material
Ordu Kush = 0 basic res, 0 advanced res, 2 crafting material
Shingeng = 5 basic res, 3 advanced res, 7 crafting material
Urukonium = 12 basic res, 1 advanced res, 15 crafting material

Obviously there is some trade in the Mal Motsha/Keshalia region.  There are about 96 buy/sell orders combined.  58 of those are for gathered crafting materials.  Now compare this to Centrum:

Centrum = 69 basic res, 599 advanced res, 947 crafting material

1,615 different offers, nearly a thousand of them for materials that are not available to every city.  There is no economic reason for me not to use Centrum.  It has everything I want, prices are mostly reasonable, and if I keep caravans waiting there I can have my merchandise delivered within 18 hours.  However, if trade distance were limited and I wanted to ship res to a member of my own alliance who for some unfathomable reason had no cities in western Keshalia, I would want a trader in at least one regional hub.  The same is true if I wanted to keep my gold and production in house, so to speak.  It wouldn't make sense to put special deals up for my allies in Centrum, where someone else will probably snap it up first, but if we both have a trader in a sleepy regional hub there is much less chance of an outsider grabbing the deal before my friends do.