It's not profitable enough when you get past 16 cities, and even then you pushing it, because of current score mechanic. And why you normally see raiders adopt a soldiers only policy ones they start to get to that size.
Wish create the problem that it depends on hitting inactive nations for the majority of targets, which starts to get few in numbers at that point.
It's simply not sustainable otherwise, Arrgh constantly see a return and then leaving of whale sized nations, who stick around for a few months of fun, before leaving again or effectly just stop raiding while sitting around, because it simply not sustainable to raid at that size. Look
Other issues, is target selections which is chore to do, even if it can compensated somewhat by bots. An easier ingame nation search system, would still be a boon. specially for new players who have to sort through thousands of ingame nations manually, to find a few decent targets.
Other issue is that nearly all war updates, have negatively effect raiders in some way. Even when that is not the intent. Like the buff to tanks, they can kill airplanes. Do you know what that did? People built a bunch of tanks, like they maxed them out for a good while here(it's have gotten better).
You aren't beathing throught that with soldiers only, while also having to deal with counters. I changed to missiles beiging as my go to for while(something you only can do to one nation at time by the way, instead of normal 5, raiders is expected to attack), before i slowly stopped raiding all together and now retired from it.
And that was while we got hit by a nerf that was target at raiding, increasing the score of cities, to limit the range of raiders. And then not soon after, soldiers got nerfed aswell. That Arrgh had to lobby extremely hard for to even weaken that nerf.
And then we got a compesation for the nerf, a 100 wars won would give a project slots, the rest of you started complaining and got it changed to a 100 wars fought for a project slots.
Even thought that was buff that was specifically meant to compensate raiders for having low infra.