It can be. In essence, the only thing drive demand does is save you shipments. If you have tons of shipments and can get by just fine selling each for one, great…but if you're a smaller clan, then you might need to drive the demand. Essentially, it's a tradeoff between saving energy and saving shipments, but the ratio gets skewed the more you try to push it.
A good way to do it is to drive demand to 4 over and over. It's efficient as it's a square, gives 4x as much profit as not doing anything (obviously) and isn't hard to get to. It gives the most bang for its buck, generally; 1 gives you 1 for 0 turns of drive demand, sure, but it's easily the most shipment-devouring. 2 gives you 2 every 1 turn, and halves the rate at which shipments get devoured, which is very nice, but largely pointless when you see how 4 works out. Once you get to 2, it will take only 2 turns, then sell, then two turns. 4/2 = 2/1 obviously, so disregarding the 1 drive demand it takes to get to 2 initially, it gives the same ratio of Profit/Drive Demand, for half the resources.
Once you get to 9 or so, then it's 9 profit for 6 turns, so 3/2 (which is exactly the same as selling when you have 3 profit per crate every time, except this sucks less shipments from you). Obviously worse than 4/2, but is decent if you're really low on crates, or something costs a huge amount (there are more upgrades that nobody's discovered apparently).
Then at 16 it's 16/12, which is 4/3. Even worse.
4 FTW. 4TW.
P.S. It's kind of hiliariawesome to see Jick trying to spade things. Status update on tables: currently in a turned position.
