The fact they were named ‘Confused’ is due to the often-amorphous set of beliefs they showed while in positions of power (or at least in positions for their actions to matter enough in 18th century society to be recorded) with many debating in the judicial stages patronized by Joseph II later on with arguments tending towards limiting the damaging effects of radicalism and ideology worship.
The ‘Confused’ were equally suspicious of old ideas of the Ancient Regime as they were of new ideas of the Pombaline Regime. This is because they witnessed both the collapse of the moral standard in the church and the court at the same time they lacked any nostalgic bias on the new institutions that replaced them, leading to a void of attachment and a general lack of interest in radically believing in any authority, right or left winged. They therefore made most decisions following an idea of rationalism instead of ideology.
With the right kind of leadership, this generation of relative ideological agnosticism could set Portugal dramatically apart from the rest of Europe following the end of Napoleon. While the post-Napoleonic consensus among the rest of the continent seems likely to still be the ultra-conservative and absolutist one engineered by Metternich, the generation taking charge after 1810 are likely to not desire a simple winding back of the clock, or even to believe that doing so is at all possible. The time of when Portugal was run by aristocrats and priests was the time when it was a has-been power with practically no protagonistic role in Europe and a near-universally decreasing one in the rest of the world; if other, larger powers think they can get by via bottling the genie of the French Revolution, I think Portugal is unlikely to.
So, it's not that implausible for that generation of leadership to embrace pluralism and wider political participation. The new consensus about what "Portugal" is would have to include the non-European people of the empire if it is to avoid the fate of the Netherlands - doomed to slide away from first-rate power by the sheer demographic weight of its rivals.
Hence, the farm countryside was usually the biggest speaker in the talks of immigration; just as they showed remarkable interest in some areas, the Évora typhoid outbreak had contributed to a xenophobic perception towards alien agglomerates, especially African ones, even though scientists insisted with the population it was due to water contamination. Members of the new generation saw influxes of non-whites to the urban centers of agricultural districts in the south but, also being raised in the age of slavery abolition in Portugal, saw them as groups of people to look down to as unsophisticated workers rather than someone to put in chains.
As for consumption it could be summed up to the tiniest things accumulated into a grand total that would affect mindset, schedules and social mingling. The Irish, for example, preferred mead and beer to wine, which quickly caused them to retreat from Portuguese taverns to their own established public houses.
But this is clearly already presenting a challenge. The national leadership might reasonably come to the conclusion that internal conflict, specifically conflict which is not moderated and resolved by the political infrastructure, hinders the nation from projecting power outward - Portugal can't afford to expend troops on bottling the chance of inter-ethnic or inter-racial war. The current generation of native Portuguese might be relatively open-minded to new arrivals, but if new communities are created and they have little to no interaction or communication between each other or to natives then attitudes between groups are probably going to harden into tribalism. A 'solution' that might be offered to this problem would be to simply stamp out all minority differences, either enforcing conversion on cultural issues or deporting groups whose differences from the majority are immutable. Aside from literally being what Hitler would do, this just isn't possible or is something that would even occur to the Confused Generation; again, the clock can't be turned back, there exists no order to stamp everybody into. Portugal has already left the
closed society and can't go back. The only option is to build a new consensus, which actively gets all groups involved and interacting with each other to set right misconceptions and misunderstandings and to moderate views of one another. It seems unavoidable, given the overall objective of Portugal's immigration policies, that there will be local areas that become dominated by this or that group (fewer people will move if there isn't a community they can immediately be familiar with on the other end), but that doesn't have to end in tribalism if members of those semi-separate areas can be motivated to interact with each other. Children of different backgrounds can go to the same schools, and parents of those children can be made to discuss between each other how (part of) the budget of their school is spent.
Participatory Budgeting in general can be a potent way to create discussion across groups of a local community, so long as whatever scheme the government comes up with has the outcome that it is universally preferable for each group to cooperate and compromise with the others, rather than seeing funds as a finite resource to squabble over. A Ministry of Culture, an Interior Ministry, and the Royal Family, working together, could actively produce a new heritage for Portugal, via new and inclusive art councils that sponsor a syncretism of artistic traditions, the promotion of new or existing habits that can serve as a common ground between existing identities (an Irish immigrant and a native Portuguese might disagree on alcohol, but they can both enjoy a coffee nap in the afternoon), or the funding of museums that diversify in their staff and humanise their portrayal of the non-European people of the empire.
They also housed the more conservative and traditional dimension of the Portuguese population. Rural folk included the biggest defenders of classic mass and valuing the guidance of priests over that of government appointed magistrates. Most of the people living in the countryside, even in the younger ‘Confused’ Generation, composed the faction that valued the effects of the many revolutionary movements the least. They had, however, a surprising ability to welcome refugees and PRP migrants, seeing them as new neighbors in lands abandoned by the young folks.
Portuguese farmlands became impeccably organized and equipped, but also increasingly incapable of retaining younger generations
This is the start of a problem that the country's agricultural policy will have to deal with; a countryside which falls below the population density needed for social health, and which has trouble transmitting expertise from older to younger generations. A deep flaw of our cultural idea of the single-family farm is that it is very rare, especially when existing farmers can't sire an heir to directly replace them, for people who aren't farmers to become farmers in such a model. That one family is effectively required to go from not running a farm at all to running it entirely, the farm itself might be going from nearly non-existent to requiring full operation and profitability. It doesn't leave much room for specialisation into certain areas, produce, or crafts that the individual farmer might have a latent talent for (there isn't much that capital can do to increase a farmer's time in the day, and definitely not their mental bandwidth which has to keep track of all the interweaving elements of their farm - monoculture is as popular as it is because it's simpler than farming methods which are less capital-intensive and are more efficient overall, but are taxing on labour and organisation), and aside from people who happen to already be born into farming families, there is little room for apprenticeship or training. There is also the issues of Napoleon - the Peninsular War is certain to desolate the countryside, especially in the east, reducing the stock of working farms and competent farmers further.
If agriculture is to continue becoming more efficient and professional, then an inevitable requirement is to break down the barriers to entry. The MLE system seems to be a lot more collaborative and flexible than 'Anglo-Saxon' family farming, but the ability for farmers to cooperate and specialise, and take in new arrivals, should be increased. There would also need to be some government-backed scheme to reestablish farmland torched during the campaigns against Napoleon, perhaps doubling as a scheme to compensate the huge population of veterans that are sure to exist once the war is over, perhaps by offering farmers in surviving MLEs and more traditional arrangements to increase their land and wealth by helping found new MLEs and taking veterans under their wing.