I play Germans, and the fury toggle has never been a problem for me. Germans require more micro-management in battle, something I enjoy, but many others may not. It's definitely an underdog to British but I prefer the play style.
As far as salt, it's hard to translate nation popularity to NTGs. If it was as simple as others claim, I'd expect Silk to be the most difficult one to collect because Japanese are unanimously the weakest nation (every experienced player will agree with this, and I actually used to play them). My theory is that there are a few other factors at play here:
- Perhaps coalition NTGs aren't really as random as they seem, salt seems to be a common requirement for the more desired coalitions like Americans, whereas I've never seen that coalition require Silk.
- You're a lot less likely to see an easy/abandoned German base than weaker nations (for Brtis, there are a ton more players in that pool to begin with, so the number of abandoned bases is also higher).
In fact, I strongly suspect it to be a combination of these factors. I actually don't find salt to be harder to collect, I just find that it disappears the fastest. But don't take my word for it, do a test yourself, stop going to wars for a week or two and collect NTGs without spending them, see if salt is still the last one to fill up, for me it isn't.