New players may lack the awareness that it's even an option. Casual players may lack the patience for twiddling through quests to get the ones they want.

There are still playstyles where direct production can matter - an age rusher on a new server for instance can find themself limited by goods more than FP due to how many ways there are now to increase FP production. However, in the absence of 1 down kits choosing new goods buildings as event rewards would be for planned problems months down the road - and you could just as easily fix that by saving more goods before you leave your current age. Previous era goods can still pose a challenge at times due to monoage hoods where everyone's getting the same current age goods from quests and the same unrefined goods from their GBs and therefore don't want to trade for those ages you yourself are getting easily. Once you settle into this means of producing goods it's hard to find value in a building solely for its goods production that is worth maybe 1 quest reward when you're getting dozens of quest rewards a day (incidentally this playstyle is also how i got through the original medal expansions before Arc existed).

And then in some cases traded to other ages they also want to use/sell. Most goods produced by sellers are not produced directly from buildings but from quest rewards boosted by chateau frontenac.

Forge of empire fall event 2018