Glad to see this expressed about missions. Mission trees are somewhat of a Goldilocks feature for Paradox. They are an easy avenue for producing new "content" that they can sell DLC over, but at the same time they can use them to patch up systemic issues with the game without having to address their causes.
I think people like mission trees in the sense that the game is old and they have seen and done everything else, so coming back to a familiar tag with a new set of things to do is better than nothing. It also gives some morsels of RP material for people who care about history and would like tags to feel different from each other, and reflect history more.
The thing is, that should be systemically generated. I remember from the release of EU4 that they wanted to move away from strong historical guard rails and let dynamic systems produce diverse and historically appropriate outcomes, with events only there to add flavour. Mission trees are an admission of failure in that goal.
I am especially concerned about permanent bonuses given by missions. Permaclaims are one thing, but "until the end of the game" modifiers are very problematic. The fact those need to be there to entice players to care about missions says a lot. Conversely min maxers and multiplayer people have already started complaining about mission tree X not being as strong as tree Y and tallying them up with NIs and so on. Like is that really where we want missions to be?
I would be much happier if mission trees provided a set of interesting constraints and challenges and not just another collection of bonuses to stack. Bonus stacking has gotten way out of hand in EU4 game design and it really trivialises the game.
