[tharkun__]

I'm with your parent. For me there was a progression.

First playthrough I was anxious to get to the automation parts. This continued as I explored more of the game, more of the automation possibilities, blueprinting, trying to make an all solar, all steam or all nuclear factory etc.

At some point and I don't know when exactly it turned. I like the initial bootstrapping phase and at varying points I just get this "ugh, really? This pre-requisite, then this, then this and then finally I can build what I really want?" and then I shut it down and play Dungeon Keeper 2 or something like that instead.

[kgwxd]

Sounds like the honeymoon phase of starting a new software project. The second you hit a problem there’s no beautiful solution to, the magic is gone.

[tharkun__]

I would agree with you if this happened during the first playthrough. But it didn't. Not even the second or third or soon after that. It's on the n-th playthrough where a certain tech-tree part just feels like a wall now. Everything up to that is still fun but then there's that wall now that's not worth breaking through.

As for beautiful solution to software development: Personally I am somewhere in the middle. I like beautiful solutions. I advocate for clean and maintainable code. But I have no patience for dogmatic "this the only good way to solve this" BS any longer. There are many ways to solve the same problem. All have their pros and cons. I'm not gonna let my people spend another week refactoring this to some staff engineer's liking, keeping it out of the hands of customers ;)