Our traderoutes are terrible. The jumpholes are terrible, and some of the systems are pretty lame (Dresden. Munich has a couple of traderoutes in it but it's bad for players because of its layout. Frankfurt and Hamburg and Stuttgart are dead in terms of routes, and exist only as highways.)
I can log on my LWB or my VF and see that there is maybe one trader in the whole of Rheinland and he is in some place I can't get to. I can wait 40 minutes and see that no more traders have appeared. I can then check for lawful activity if I feel like a fight, and see that there are 3 battleships and 5 fighters in Hamburg, and nothing anywhere else. I can fly to Hamburg and be ganked, sit in Stuttgart and never meet any traders, or log off and switch characters and do something else. If I'm on my RHA, I'll probably notice there is something more exciting happening in the Omegas and go there.
Basically everyone is too busy smuggling in their zoner whales on their own, and Rheinland is the first major gameplay casualty.
Also yeah really Rheinland is horrible to get around in. Munich is just a joke, it's way off on one side of an otherwise useless system, and is joke huge. And for unlawfuls, the jumpholes, my god. At least with the sigma 13 hole around it was possible to get from stuttgart to hamburg in less than 400 years. If I see a trader in Frankfurt when I'm in Stuttgart, there's nothing I can do. He'll be back in Kusari by the time I get there.