[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

- The vast majority of products you create are never actually employed to do anything and are instead thrown into a blender to make science-goo, arbitrary amounts of which are required to unlock new stuff that is also mostly destined for the blender.

- Bots are introduced way too late in the game, forcing the player to manage the rapidly increasing complexity of their infrastructure manually for a large portion of it.

- Power distribution is a tedious non-problem you're forced to keep solving, again manually most of the time because bots come so late in the game.

To name a few. The natural argument here is that those things are required to motivate the player to make their automation faster and more efficient to progress the game, but the point is that they feel needlessly arbitrary. In a game like Subnautica, for instance, there are some big high-resource things you have to build with reasonably deep critical paths, but they are things you actually use instead of just melting them down to increase a number somewhere. They feel necessary, science-slurry doesn't.

Players also claim that yeah, that's all true, but the real game doesn't start until after you've researched everything and launched your first rocket anyway. Meaning all of that is essentially a 40 hour tutorial.