That's all definitely true.
An apology if any of this sounds angry/annoyed, some of the comments elsewhere have been less than favourable. My logic at the start of the contest was fairly simple; I didn't realise it wasn't mirrored (or approved of) on the German side. Translation may have some part here, or else people just not thinking through the contest rules.
It was never stated explicity by me here for multiple reasons, including that (a) I assumed it would be evident to others, or at least, some others, and (b) that I am very new here, and was not about to go posting in depth strategy guides to people who have been playing a game more than ten times as long as I have.
For December 31 you want the best valuation you can.
To get this, you are going to have some number of rich R (more is good!), wealthy W (more is good unless R > P), and poor P (bad!). At some point you are going to want to limit the number of poor in your Hanse to better your score. Everybody will do this, even if only by accident. You can do this by having full HTHs limiting immigration via housing, or having full businesses limiting immigration via jobs. You can do it constantly, or just as a year-end adjustment for the assessment date.
In all games I've ever played, if you have a set battle-time/score-date/assessment-date etc., you aim to optimise your army/score/character etc. for that time, and don't care about values at other times. When I played Settlers that time was the end of "peace time"; when I played I.C. or Atlantis that was the expiry date of whichever non-aggression pact you had with your relevant neighbour (except playing Patrick, for which it tended to be every day!
); for Diablo online it's the character level which you call "endgame", and for Patrician contest 2007 it is December 31.
Let's say you end up with R rich and P poor by restricting poor immigration through cutting out HTHs (preferable to restricting jobs in an expanding Hanse, although not necessarily in a steady-state Hanse). By not restricting poor immigration, I'll most probably have R rich and P+Z poor. The extra poor allow me to have extra spare production (poor people only eat about 50% of what they produce, compared to about 200% for rich) so having more poor during the game means I'll have more goods in my stockpiles. I then have the option of kicking out Z poor, in which case I'll have the same score as if I restricted immigration
as well as identical production / population. Alternatively, I can kick out less, in which case I'll have a worse score but better production, or I can kick out more poor for a better score and worse production (an option that is also available to the restricted player).
In other words, if you choose to evict at the end, you should have bigger goods stockpiles,
and more flexibility about how you choose to balance your score-economic state for Dec 31, than if you restrict poor all the way through the year.
Provided that getting more poor doesn't come at the expense of getting rich/wealthy. Roughly, your economic state is just dependent on population, as long as you get your industry balance right - which is where most of my planning time has gone.
And, roughly, your final score depends only on how many rich and wealthy you can get into your Hanse. More rich means better options for your score, period. Come December, you get to make a choice between increasing your score (evicting poor) or keeping a strong economy - and whatever strategy you use before then, you have that choice at the end. Adding more poor in just gives slightly greater flexibility of options, although probably the low-score options that you're not going to take until later years. My gameplay has never been designed around aiming to destroy every HTH in sight, even if I've effectively done that for 1300/01 (as have many others, although mostly mid year). It's been around maximising rich numbers, and maximising the flexibility / options available at assessment time.
That was my logic as of game-time May 1300 on my first run through, and it's only changed very barely since then.
There has been talk on the German side about my game involving cheating - or at least that's the best translation I can get. I think that's perfectly valid, my games are massively exploting infinite-money cheats (captains buying essentially unlimited goods and selling them risk free for higher prices), resource-free building (for hemp, at least), various building cheats to reduce the AIs road building beyond what the programmers intended, and unscrupulous destruction of my competitor's businesses in dishonest ways (clicking on that destruct button for buildings I don't own).
In these circumstances, it takes a very peculiar frame of mind to say that destroying buildings I own myself, in a manner intended to be allowed by the game designers (albeit for purposes they may not have considered), is not acceptable.
But perhaps it's all a matter of when the ideas entered the public consciousness.
I rest by my statement above that the principle matter in this contest is maximising the number of rich in your Hanse - the number of poor during the year is pretty much irrelevent. Forget the contest %s; my stats stand pretty well in terms of having more rich/wealthy than anyone else, Wasa & yet-to-submit people like BT possibly excluded.