Thanks for your input ScoutX, I'm still mainly looking at the fundamentals of the market wards & retainers themselves. But you did bring up some points:

remote interactions with a retainer via pearl
If you can direct your retainer's actions from afar and place them in other cities, you run the risk of enhancing a single dominant market. Example: A player in Limsa Lominsa is mining valuable ore. Rather than travel to Ul'dah to sell the ore, the player can simply call his retainer in Limsa and send the items over to Ul'dah. Because players must still purchase directly from the appropriate market wards, players will still likely coalesce in one city state. The only difference is, there are an equal or greater number of retainers in that same market ward and less items are being sold at the other city-states.

Not that I'm against having more accessibility for retainers; linkpearls would certainly be a logical explanation for remote direction, but until the underlying problems are fixed, all the additions will make an eventual overhaul potentially more complicated.

Retainer need a licence for market wards
Also I am fairly certain retainers dissapear after a few days? I'm also not sure a significant # of retainers are from players not playing anymore, especially with all the market crashes.