Then what is pine good for? It must be good for something, as it sells for really good money on Tropica. In fact, it's about the only thing that makes me any real money, save the weekly harvest of cork (which has become less profitable over the past two weeks, cork prices going down)
Pine has good carpentry, decent parquetry and joinery bonuses. It's not the best material, but it can make some solid huts and houses.
Moreover, for many projects a good price is more important than high skill bonuses. Homes provide expansion and population bonuses regardless of quality, and only use quality to determine happiness bonus; so any house that you don't intend to actually have people working in might as well be made from any cheap wood. Also, a good number of projects need wood/charcoal to burn, but about half of them have very minimal skill bonus from the fire quality, so you might as well burn the cheapest wood you can find.
Rising prices are simply due to supply and demand. There's a high demand, but low supply. Because prices are now rising, we can probably expect to see more people training additional lumberjacks and producing more wood, which should cause prices to regulate eventually. We may even see entire towns being settled in the middle of forests with no other viable resources, just because wood is suddenly a profitable venture.
In other news, I recently discovered hotkeys, and find that they save a lot of time. I can select [A]ll of the units in the current tile, tell them to build a [R]oad, plow a [F]ield, make a [H]ut, or even ask them to [G]move. I'm not sure how that last one makes sense...maybe in the dev's native language move is spelled with a G?