That would be an improvement but still doesn’t solve most of the issues.
African Fields are the ultimate synergy of horrible design. Every single unique aspect of them works together to make them infuriating to use.
They’re trying to copy the style of AoE2/4 farms, but it doesn’t translate at all to AoE3.
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AoE2/4 have massively more APM dedicated to mundane eco management. Needing to spend that much APM on your eco puts you at a huge disadvantage to every other civ in AoE3.
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In AoE2/4, the placement of fields is done much sooner and more gradually. You run out of sheep early on when you have few villagers and gradually put down farms as you need them. In AoE3 you hunt for as long as possible and you need to transition many villagers suddenly when you either completely run out or are forced off hunts and mines. That’s dozens of villagers going idle over a short period of time exactly when you are under the most military pressure.
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AoE2/4 farms only produce food and don’t need to be switched over. There is no need to select many individual farms so it isn’t an issue.
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The extremely slow build time of fields greatly compounds all the above issues. There is a huge delay for all of your idle villagers getting back to work and a huge delay getting the fields toggled to the right resource. Since it takes so damned long to actually build them you usually end up throwing down way more than you actually need and it becomes really difficult to keep track of and assign villagers to properly fill them.
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They take up an ungodly amount of space. Having to place them around a Granary means you need to take up double the footprint of a mill or plantation. A set of 8 fields does support more villagers, but it needs a huge square area as opposed to being able to tuck 2 mills into separate more restricted spaces.
Overall, the way it plays out in AoE3 makes it exponentially more tedious to manage.
No matter what, they need to make fields bigger. To keep them fitting around the Granary, they could crop off the corners to make them still line up, or just merge 2 fields together into a rectangle. With rectangular fields, you could split them into 2 different types such as a vertically oriented one for coin and a horizontally oriented one for food (or vice versa). You could rotate them when building, or toggle them to the other resource after being built to get a nice fit around a Granary.