I mean, some people just prefer to play the game more leisurely. It's not a speed run or a business deliverable. I have around 80 hours on my factory so far and it's pretty clear to me I could have "finished" by now with a lot more corner cutting but I'm enjoying the process of exploring each tech tree discovery in depth and scaling things out "right". This takes longer, but it's fun and I feel better about the end result, and isn't that the point?

Also -- playing the game over again gives a colossal speed benefit. Probably half of my time spent on this game has been ripping up everything I did that I realize clearly won't work nicely once I reach the next tech tree item. Knowing what the end game looks like in advance saves a lot of time.

I think I partly like this game because it reminds me of programming before programming was work. Trying to get through everything as fast as possible sounds like the antithesis of that, but maybe that's just me.