Squalor Is Your Friend for Mods

I finally realized that squalor is your friend for mod-ing (better slow than never). Two months back, I got tired of the basic squalor problem and started using a custom trait mod (TrainedRuler) quick-fix that knocked down squalor. This made the immediate strategic problem go away but cities got really huge and had problems making a profit and this worsened the family member shortage problem. I think I have finally realized a "better" answer that I have seen implied in several posts but not explained in an explicit way (hence this post).

The real problem is the balance of squalor, health, law, and happiness. Squalor is needed to limit population, but you still need growth to a huge_city for the tech tree and should be able to hold a huge_city with only a large garrison and without a "good" family member. (not possible with the default settings).

My conclusion/recommendation: Give all family members a small squalor reduction (say 3-5) so you need a family member as governor to grow a huge_city (and/or large_city). Then increase the bonuses for law, health, and happiness for various buildings at each tech level such that a max-built huge_city (say population @ 30000 and with a maximum garrison and no governor) can have "zero growth" but will also have a "loyalty rating of about 120%". A good governor would still be needed to maximize profit from that city.

This seems like the most reasonable/realistic approach to me. Comments are sought and welcome.

Edit Update: I should mention that this approach seems to play OK without messing up the AI in any obvious fashion. For example, my huge cities would peak at about 33K population in the game and would not rebel when without a governor. Since the building changes apply to all factions, I did note that the AI factions usually had smaller garrisons than had been previously typical and showed faster military expansion. A "purist" might argue that this would give the player a cheap-shot tactic of sea-invasion to roman core cities that are barely garrisoned.