Yes, there were traders; The first year. I know this because the liaison came, and I made the agreement, but had been so busy with construction that I didn't trade with them. I Initially thought that was why they weren't coming back, but 8+ Years is an awfully long time...
And yes, the Wagon did start on the ice. (I think right under the 'middle' of that brige) I was thinking that the traders were trying to arrive on the iced edges during seasons where there isn't ice. (my was to build a re floored border around the edge of the map, but, as you can guess, that would take forever on the 3x~8 map, nor do I recall if you can actually re floor right on the edge...)
Does the code allow traders (and migrants) want to choose impossible routes to your fortress? Like try to make them spawn over Water, and if they can't, don't spawn them at all? Or can it attempt to spawn them on any appropriate square? Also, while players can't affect the outer ~10 or whatever tiles on the map, the player could still re wall a big 'fort' wall around the inside and flood the rest. (or just lock the door) Filling all of the outer most squares with un-pathable tiles like walls would kind of break the game, but on a normal size map, would take forever. World-Flooding or Turtling inside a No-Entrance Fortress are much easier options. (for now ) That tower and the bridge took me hours and hours of micromanagement to create with SPEED 0 workers; In a normal game, a player simply could not accomplish that in any reasonable amount of time, and I estimate Trapping or Walling off the Outer Edge of a map to be just as much work. (Besides, you would have to wall off all the Z levels, since they would just spawn on top of your walls anyway, and traps would eventually jam)