It would be really nice to be able to call up the info on cargo items from any screen. It would also be nice to see the market standing of trade goods in the region with the click of a button.

Join a major trade guild ?

"Join a major trade guild"
The only one there is. :-)

Quite

I need to link this discussion to another post. It branches here.

If there were a way to communicate information between players, in-game, without causing clutter on the message window, it'd be trivial to create a few scripts that would record prices, over time. Is there a Lua function that might do this?

TCPSocket and HTTPlib.

You (devs) can always, rather than concentrating on the "biggest demand" items to make known, target just a few items (consumer electronics, plasteel, inert chemicals, etc.) to publicize demand for, and leave the other ones for people to discover on their own. It would create a kind of "easy trade good" and "hard trade good" partition of commodities...and you could adjust xp bonuses accordingly.