I really do wish the national ideas for smaller nations were more rewarding. I understand giving the nations that were powerful historically good ideas but when most of those nations also start with at least a dozen provinces and quickly get more it just becomes a pain to fight any of them. But I don't think that justifies most OPMs also having completely garbage ideas, if someone manages to succeed as a country like Theodoro or some other OPM that usually gets eaten quickly and doesn't have a good mission tree then at least their late-game national ideas should be strong to make up for it instead of giving them useless/ineffectual shit. There are so many small nations with shitty starts that would be fun to turn around if they still wouldn't be outclassed by every other major/'lucky' after expanding up into the 1550s.