No job is pointless, but some of them don’t scale very well.
Like, I think you were a farmer in the last game. The farming/fishing/cooking path is pretty deep, with lots of complex dishes requiring lots of equipment. It seems like it should be able to carry you into late game. But I was able to get great nutritional balance from just eating basic cooked tomatoes and basic cooked fish. And at a certain point, you become so efficient at those things that there’s way more supply than demand, and so you can have trouble finding people willing to trade with you.
I wanted to do wood construction in the same game. And that worked well for a long time because basically everyone needs wood to build houses and furniture and stuff. But over time, demand for wood gets less and less as people start to need stone (plus, they really only need one of each piece of furniture, not multiples). So again, by the end, there were just piles and piles of wood laying around because no one needed them, and I didn’t feel like there was anything I could really do to contribute.
Maybe the idea is that you need to be frequently re-speccing based on the overall technology level. But dammit, I wanted to cut trees and make tables!
Counter-intuitively, I think the more cooperative your group, the more the game systems start to fall apart. Why have laws when everyone is pretty much getting along? Why have shops when everyone is pretty much sharing everything? Why bother making clothes when everyone else is going into electricity and engineering and making a beeline for the objective?
It seems like a lot of the systems are designed assuming you have players who are rational but also self-interested and maybe a little vain. When you have players who know what they’re doing and who are willing to share everything to go down the critical path as quickly as possible, you wind up not needing a lot of stuff. So now I make sure to do my part by wanting stuff that isn’t strictly necessary, like a huge mansion, a stocked kitchen, and a diverse wardrobe.