I’m disgruntled by those news for this reason as well.
Stellaris walked that path. Many people like it as a toy, but it never become a working strategy game: instead of spending time on teaching AI to play they rework mechanics again and again. It results in me switching the game after a next rework, doing obvious and very boring stuff like clicking “build station” everywhere and after a few hours of obvious choices and couple of one battle wars it turns out that I’m the strongest power in the universe. I can now sit for a 100 years preparing for a crisis to come, such joy. This is an obvious result of working on adding features instead of making sure those features work.
I thought that I:R has a very solid fundamentals. I could see myself spending hundreds of hours in that game after they fix UI and polish it here and there. But even if their changes result in a better design (which I seriously doubt) it would mean that this is another game designed to be launched once every patch, marvel at new stuff and turn it off once you get how it works.
Another thing is that I’m irritated by the fact people regard MP as abstract but not money. Money is abstract thing by design! Money buys you stuff and is worthless on its own! Now instead of government ability and will to do military/civic/oratory/religious stuff you’ll have a single currency for all of this. It’s beyond me how can anyone call this less abstract.