So it seems there is an attempt to fix the early age science farming in the changes for next age. Many don't agree with this for multiple reasons so I'm going to give my 2 cents:

Change book production and effects both to BPA. This would remove the issue of the farms as small provs couldn't generate as many books.
- Okay, we did this before and it caused serious problems with early growth kds farming science and being hard to catch up for kds late age so how do we fix that?
Keep the proposed decay mechanic. The decay should start off small and scale with BPA. This keeps early growth kds from completely running away with BPA. At no point should the decay outpace your books generated where you actually lose science though (this would apply heavily to chained provinces).
I would also suggest a change to schools where they not only increase BPA but also decrease decay rate to make things a bit more interesting.

Thoughts?