How to get out of dept?

[ReluctantSamurai]

I learned as time went by that my fear of squalor in my cities due to growth was leading to a false assumption about the impact of building farms.

Exactly. For richer factions, there's no need to rush the building of farms...many cities grow fast enough without the added push from improved farmland. However, at some point, most cities come to a growth standstill (a desirable thing only after you have achieved the highest tier for that city) and need to be nudged, as you have pointed out. A few selected cities rarely need more than tier1 farmland...Alexandria, Memphis, and Carthage come to mind, as they have the provincial grain bonus to move them along. Even with max-level farming and a fertility temple, I still find the need to have a governor with population boosting traits and/or ancillaries to reach the top tier in size for some cities. Rhodes is a tough one to get to 24k, as pointed out, as are places like Salamis, Sparta, Damascus, and some of the coastal cities along the Adriatic and eastern Med.

I play Armenia quite a lot and I have never gotten either of their two starting cities to 24k. Nowadays, I don't even try. As long as they can produce Cataphract Archers at 12k, I'm happy. The best thing, as mentioned, is to push quickly into richer territory.

Farm management is a tricky thing to manage, but certainly not the squalor monster many folks portray it as, as pointed out.