The global pool is rly funny to me.
For the first month of the world glimmermoss is the be all end all. Cool kids can see all gimmermoss pretty comfortably by day 2, and you can collect enough for an entire village before the global pool kicks in. When the regular users get to be able to see glimmers they instantly become so rare they're not worth looking for regardless if you're it's automated or not.
You can automate pearling enough to where getting a Pneck replacement for your entire village every few months is trivial, even when the global pool is empty. If there were no gloabl pool studying pearls would be ??kinda?? OP a little bit. But nobody would ever study pearls outside of heavily botting it, and people would only heavily bot it to study them, so...
Cave clay is the only other global pool foregable that matters, and it probably matters the most. 100% automated by every relevant group, 0 issues with the global pool. Could be fixed by making the best caveclay Q =< the average pit clayQ.
It's also pretty funny that an infinite supply of things like morales would probably increase player power more than the stuff people seem actually concerned about people having too much of, like flotsams/pearls. I don't think morales even have a global pool.
The actual good foreagable curios(angler lights, blowholes, glimmermoss early on, ivory figurines) are all at least partially automated by, I think, most people.
The global pool feels a lot like DRM that hurts regular users, and does nothing to stop automation, outside of people not quite getting enough pearls to study. (((which probably doesn't even matter with UA equalization, and if it did nobody would care if pearls were nerfed as a curio)))
P.S the people talking about local pools underestimate how good autopathers are. Plus, if a foregable were actually powerful enough to warrant caring about botting it, my guess is it would be easy to set up enough chars/locations to automate it still