Local leader is mostly about giving you abilities that you SHOULD start the game with, imo. With dozens of settlement locations, supply lines are only common sense, and since I'm ordering all of these people around from day one already, why can't I give this one essential instruction?
Crafting stations are common as dirt, and I'm positive that everyone who crafts has a home base where they do it. It just doesn't happen that someone wanders across some random crafting station and stops to do some mods with whatever they've picked up, does it? I finally gave myself the perks with the console because I wanted to build extra power armor stations to display my power armor. That's all I wanted to do, and it was going to cost me perk points. Just for that.
Sure, trading posts could be game breaking if you started with them. But other perks are required to build those anyway. Just up those requirements to make it an effort to get them.
It just seems to me that mostly, Local Leader is about fixing an artificial inconvenience, not really adding something to your gameplay.