For me, 1.9 was just too shallow economically. The one point I will agree with you is that strategic resources were far superior in 1.9x in that they actually were 'strategic resources'. The current system we have with both the market and the ability to manufacture motes, crystals and gas an absolute joke. They are not strategic resources at all.
Oh obviously. They're just bloat, intentional bloat created in a way to make it seem as if the economy has more depth than it really has. You could remove all the new strategic resources, simply increase the mineral costs,
This may be a matter of conflicting preferences. Plenty of people were asking for a more complex economy system. People asked for management of all of their worlds to be left with them, because they hated losing control (there’d be less call for that if the sector AI wasn’t so terrible, but some fans really hate not having direct control over every world). Some people really want that level of granularity. Personally, I’d prefer to turn over control of most of my worlds to a reliable sector AI after a while. But when you get down to it, I find the new economy system much better than the old one.
The "forced to hand over control" of planets, and wanting planets completely REWORKED and turned into a permanent micro-management hell equation doesn't hold up. I hated the old sectors. Because they felt like being forced to play together with your four-year-old cousin, having him get his sticky greasy fingers all over your stuff. That didn't mean I wanted to have planets changed in a way that forces me to constantly babysit them.
Removing old sectors does not in any kind of way shape or form relate to the change they inflicted upon planets. Planets in the past were at a certain point simply done, they were finished. They would simply chug along endlessly without any kind of involvement. The sector Ai oftentimes outright sabotaged this. This is not the case with the new planets, and wanting to get rid of the sector Ai does not mean one wanted the current situation. It simply meant not wanting to have to deal with the sector Ai.
Hell, not even auto-upgrade is really linked to this. That's a feature most games had since let's say the late 90s. And Paradox refuses to include in their games. And no, the new economy system is absurdly bloated, they changed basically nothing but adding a bunch of extra hoops you have to jump through to it. While also forcing you to constantly babysit every single last planet unless you want your Empire to go down in flames.
I don't think there are more important problems with the game now. My answer was referriung to why those problems haven't been fixed yet: because they've been overhauling the problems with the game's core warfare, economy and diplomacy systems, which took priority over the bugs that emerged in the meantime. The warfare and eocnomy overhauls created new issues, but they couldn't divert the resources necessary to deal with them until the core gameplay problems had been dealt with.
Megacorp came out two years ago. Since then nothing was really changed or done. Many of the current problems were introduced back then and have barely been acknowledged. You were initially arguing that they had bigger issues to tackle right now. Ever since people asked for specifics you've been constantly moving the goalpost.
Stellaris now is massively different from Stellaris on released. And that's because the devs realised there were fundemental issues with the core systems, not mere bugs. No amount of tweaking AI was going to fix the warfare system, or make the economy interesting. They had to basically be rebuilt from the ground up. That takes time and manpower.
Warfare hasn't changed beyond being slightly slowed down. Funnily enough, some folks go for a colossus to pretty much get the old warfare back as it becomes tedious eventually. Doomstacks are alive and kicking, the same as they have always been. The economy is just as flat as it was, just with more tacked on bloat that does very little.
And over the last two years since their big overhaul, they pretty much just put out some cosmetic DLCs and minor additions. One might think the game is "finished" from their point of view and almost in maintenance mode.
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