A few idea’s I’ve had for big changes to these three categories starting with where I think they fall short.
Shipping - Deploying ships for profit is time consuming finding business, the market is weak in most places, and the ROI is very bad on investing in new ships.
Trade - Shipping anything to the CX adds more air time for any product used from the CX. LM markets are sparse in many areas even though it’s the most efficient method of trade. Finding and managing listings requires a lot of work. End game trading is not very popular even though it’s a widely untapped and profitable market. Managing listings is very time consuming.
warehousing - far too small to run a real business from. they don’t serve the role they could for end game play. the cx wh being unlimited and cheap really takes away from wh as business.
A new workflow built around these changes
-remove cx entirely
-revamp warehouses to be a true hub for holding product to sell. making it a service that people can invest in and profit from
-create automatic shipping paths, ships could do fixed paths and pickup shipments using a bid/ask system that automatically fills/refuels/sends to next destination on a timed schedule.
-build a single trade system where buyers have a timeframe and destination for goods, sellers have listings at destinations, and the ability to multileg orders to close deals so a 3p could buy, ship, and deliver a good on time.
I believe these changes would breath new light into end game content. add play-style roles other than just making things that are not cumbersome.
Shipping has low profitability because there are no constraints to it, unlike base permits. You can have unlimited shipping, and should, once your next base permit costs more than a ship.
The way I interpret it is you would like to connect bases as a gameplay path. For that you need liquid local markets. If these bases are owned by the same player, then what’s the incentive for that player to not do shipping himself and place his asks on one planet and bids on another?
I feel like what’s needed is for shipping to work off the same constraint than bases and for shipping to have a form of global efficiency that is mutually exclusive with base efficiency. It’s that same old make horizontal integration better. Either you’re good at pumping H2O, farming, processing it or moving the stuff around. Or if you choose to do it all yourself, then you’re doing it less efficiently than specialists. Shipping is just another step in the production chain, after all.
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There’s virtually no market for shipping. such a small percent of goods are done through requests. my idea would make shipping markets the go to. I agree that you can get the unlimited shipping at end game now. as I see it end game is barely there and I think few actually get that benefit. I don’t think end game retention is what it needs to be. it becomes a chore of clicking through the same things constantly. making easy to use efficient markets would improve that game play in my opinion. rebalancing roi across different income sources would be a good thing. I think the gameplay needs to be there first.
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I always thought it would be interesting to separate “trading” from “hauling”.
Introducing “Hauling Capacity Markets”.
Every planet-planet combination has a market, (just like currency). If you want something shipped you bid for hauling capacity. Haulers can now completely ignore what to ship. They just check the hauling market and which pays the most for capacity. They then load a “capacity cube” on to their ship, complete the route and sell the capacity on the market.
The trader who gets the capacity can now teleport whatever goods they want, for that capacity.
This is obviously a kind of retro-active accounting system, where we say that the undefined capacity cube that was shipped, actually was those goods that got teleported. Or we just straight-up lore it up and say that it was shipping undefined-quantum-entangled mass, that later got quantum collapsed into the goods teleport. Doesn’t matter, mechanic stays the same. 
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I think that’s kinda similar to what I suggested. It would almost be like priceline. you do start → end and create a shipment. it prices out different combinations to find the cheapest path based on peoples current shipping asks.