That's exactly how I think of it, too; our orders are the end result of a whole governmental procedure. That's how I explain poor starting economies to myself: it's not that Koinon Hellenon is actually out of mnai or that building a single road fixes it, it's slow improvements to the agility and efficiency of government. I look at building a market not as constructing an agora where there was none before, but as more efficient utilization and taxation of what must surely already exist in any settlement worth including on the map. Council orders still work for me because I consider them a sort of minority opposition in the government; where their goals more-or-less align with mine, there is no reason to refuse them, but in the end their requests are just that, and can be safely ignored.