Admittedly I should have taken a closer look to understand them better before posting this. But I never got into playing Italy beyond some tests against the AI specifically because Lombards are so tedious and poorly explained. My point still stands that they should have some form of recurring deposits so you don’t have to babysit them so much.
I have seen nothing but confusion in those threads. None of the comments or tutorials ever explained that the only benefit to building more than one Lombard is getting a faster exchange rate. Maybe also some extra experience from Uffizi but that’s not clear either. Every description is super ambiguous if anything applies to each Lombard or all of them in general.
Even the in game description explicitly compares them to Banks, which is a horrible comparison and would indicate each individual Lombard does something.
I suppose my main cause of consternation is this:
Why can you build 5 of them if additional Lombards do almost nothing!?
Speeding up the exchange rate is practically useless compared to the utility of the initial Lombard. At the very least it should be clearly indicated what building multiples does. And even then it should be limited to like 3 at most to limit the potential for shenanigans with mercenaries. To offset having a lower build limit they could throw in a tech like Double-Entry Bookkeeping that speeds up the exchange rate and gives a slight profit too.