Congrats on clearing Housing (Savage), Sturm! As someone who actually likes using housing (and is proud of her yard), welcome to the club! Since we're both on Primal, let me know if you need any furnishings. I... uh... have a problem. *stares sheepishly at retainer full of unused housing items from retainer ventures, from completing crafting logs, etc.*

But while I love doing housing stuff in-game, as someone who also does system engineering work, I cannot help but agree that this housing system is so badly broken. I get what they were going for, mind you; when a neighborhood is actually active, it's an amazing community to have. But I don't think it's worked as they intended. (Sadly, I don't see many ways to fix it without outright replacing it or adding a separate parallel housing system; every compromise I can come up with has major drawbacks.)

The real issue I see isn't even the scarcity of housing -- though that's not great -- but the fact that housing gates participation in other systems. Your FC wants to do airships/submersibles, or company crafts? Need a house. You want to do gardening where you can crossbreed seeds? You need a house. Etc. Apartments do not work for those scenarios... and that's a problem. Because not only does the scarcity of housing prevent people who want to engage with those systems from doing so, but the fact you need housing to do those things means people who don't actually care about the house but want to do those thigns need to purchase and sit on a housing plot in order to engage with the systems that interest them (like gardening).

The scarcity of housing is bad. The fact that the scarcity is both blocking participation in tangentially-related systems and exacerbated by the fact that it's required for those systems... that's disastrous in terms of system design.