Ok, although 5.4 to 1.8 and 5.5 to 2.2 is pretty insane, if you can fix it by managing your horses it still sounds doable. I must admit that I have no idea how much cargo you must move to get to the higher levels of the trade skill. I'm usually 50-125 tops. AI caravans being easy targets seems pretty ****! Although this does mean it eliminates the competition for those sweet deals...
I changed my mind a little bit. I think if they want to stop the mega-trading-herds moving across the map, consuming everything and trading like mad, they should at least make it so you actually get trade points from operating caravans like the character development screen says. It seems fair to me that you should expand your business like that at some point. I see the 1.5.4. update says there are trade skills implemented but do you actually get xp from running caravans now? Of course, if they get killed easily it doesn't help anyone... You can't be everywhere at the same time so that needs a bit of a review, I'd say.