I think the most glaring issue in balance right now is that it the lodge hunt seems to easily snowball into the best paying job. You need equipment to beat the enemies in the one-time settlements when you're still too weak to beat Tide, so using that job to get money fast (so you can spend some time on Qi cultivation and push Beast Tide early enough so that it actually shows up before you die of old age, as at that point your life span's probably capping at around 100 or so) was obviously the correct choice.
The hunt thus garnered enough rank that it eventually started paying out 3 copper per day, and the Outer/Harmonized Settlement base doesn't seem to be high enough to match that at Rank 0 of its final form/deepening/whatever to call it, so I kept doing the lodge, and thus its rank just kept going up (okay to be fair there were few runs where I accidentally left the game on this job at 50x speed so it was probably higher ranked than in normal gameplay, but still)
With the dual settlements at least this seems to be an oversight in the game still letting you do it, although I don't have anything to throw money at there right now (since it shows the Willowbrook equipment instead), so that doesn't matter there. For now, at least.