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I share in the 'unpopular opinion' of
@Manueljf
, that inventory should be somewhat limited (I support materials stacks only being able to go up to 10, 12 or 20 for many things).
I don't believe that mismanagement can be stopped by adding anything to the process if we're talking about RIVALS, but for citizens, I think it helps because it changes things from 'might as well gather all the time' to 'well, is this even profitable'?
The other aspect I would strongly expect to be a thing is HOW and WHERE to gather, being important. I don't know how they would do this for trees effectively BUT there were a lot of good 'hills and small mountains' in Alpha-1 already.
Fortunately, many creatures rely on trees and you could justify having very powerful creatures around relatively normal trees that are quite aggressive. This would increase the challenge of gathering without having to change the mechanics of it. I can tell you what I am used to from Final Fantasy 11.
"Good spawns are deep in dungeons, randomized spawn locations (within a set) that move around, strong enemies often near them, your stealth must be disabled to gather."
If a group is doing the dungeon, and you are friendly, you follow them around and gather, or rely on them to 'save you' if you get aggro when you don't expect it.
This 'buffers' the Land Management because many people won't actually overfarm the WHOLE area, just the part that is easy to do for low effort. When people need to be fully geared, leveled, carrying pots and food every time they mess up a timing, and get into a fight with a mob, possibly one that has 'allies' that 'link' nearby, incentive structure for doing these actions 'whenever' shifts.
In Ashes they have the chance to make this quite useful because it can be 'you gathered a lot of the easy stuff so the node leveled up and you got a new dungeon but since that's harder to gather, it buffers the effect and even if more people come to the node and gather more at the first place, now that first place is 'only half of the total Land Management Asset space'.
The sort of person who just 'wants to quietly gather for a while' is, in my EXPERIENCE, different from the 'I'm getting my friends together and getting fully geared in a half-hour process just to even go deep enough into this dungeon to actually hit the rocks' person.
I've heard it said that FFXI is too hardcore, though, and definitely the change to 'you can gather every tree you see' is going to shift this dynamic (I disagree with it partially for that reason, but I realize this is just bias, there's nothing that prevents a good system where 'areas with lots of trees are also fairly dangerous', I just feel it is unlikely).