Oh, I'm aware of (and very comfortable with) manipulating unemployment rates to stabilize development and force cims into lower-education jobs. As a matter of fact, one of my main uses for farming/forestry in my current city is to handle the surge in workers in the period between post-birthwave YA entering the job market and post-deathwave A leaving it, as it can currently be abandoned and restarted without consequence as the need for those jobs ebbs and flows.



But in a well-designed mature city, birth/death/labor waves should be smooth, and there should there be no need for disposable places of employment. Likewise, UE is just a relation of YA/A to C/I/O, so even if you're playing full R with structural UE, it's possible to run 5-10% no matter what sort of jobs you've created. So farming/forestry winds up becoming at best equal to the other types of industry, and when UE fluctuates it instantly becomes a clear weakness unless you're worried about ground pollution. And I know people freak out about pollution (or about seeing it simulated in video games, at least), but again, if the city's designed well that shouldn't be a concern outside of the start of the game.



Knowing all this, if I see a forest or farming resource on the map, I know it makes more sense from an economic perspective to either develop it as generic industry or zone it R/C and get that production from an equivalent industrial zone elsewhere. And outside of the start of the game, that's true in every situation I would face (barring a city where generic exports are out of control, which is generally not a realistic scenario). So it would be nice to have a reason to use these specializations aside from pure aesthetics. And if there has to be a trade-off for the lack of pollution, let's have it be in goods produced, which are more closely tied to pollution than employment by the logic of the game.



Also I know the game isn't real-life, but I think this is definitely grounded in reality. Sure, there are a lot of farms who scrape the bottom of the labor pool to find their employees, but there are also a lot of educated people who go into farming as well. There are major agricultural programs at every university in the midwestern U.S., accounting for between a tenth and a sixth of all students. And if you look at who's actually doing most of the farming within urban city limits, it's almost universally people with at least a high school education if not a bachelor's degree.