I did some experimentation at one time to see if I could get more consumption and less re-hauling. I realized that it wasn't an easy thing to balance and went on to other endeavors. To be fair, I have no idea how your 1.16 plays. I don't remember seeing the mod for download. Did I miss it?
The default houses, a little scattered on the map (not right near the station) with faint demands work as far as I can tell, because they can handle a wide range of outputs with relatively little collapse in price, compared with the Barrack demand for Ammo/Weapons (concentrated in relatively few places) which can easily get overwhelmed. This enables players with very different styles to play the game as we know it successfully.
Also, houses form the back-bone of the "re-hauling" that is the basic premise of the game's freight engine. The demand strength for the houses, located some little distance (a cell or two away normally) puts a kind of "brakes" on prices constantly moving up and down. In one of my experiments I tried increasing the demand at houses trying to provoke consumption. However, this removed some of the "braking" effect that houses have been tuned for, and in consequence price was swinging faster = actually more re-hauling. Not what I intended.
This idea is rightly titled "game changer". My feeling is that the tricky part here is that having fewer concentrated places of demand will make the player focus on those and he can just play the daisy-chain of cratering demand at one then the next in a loop. I know this is a style with Weapons and Ammo already. I tend not to do it to get a haulage goal, but if it's just pure profit I'm leaving behind, why waste it?
I wish it was easy to get a bit more consumption. I hope it's possible, but I think a bit of care needs to be taken not to break the good parts of the game. Sorry if that sounds negative, but that's my
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