This gave me the cool idea of a kind of recursive/fractal game where there is the main game you can play by itself but the devs keep it open for people to slot in sub games for the bits they've simplified.

So if Factorio did this you could play as normal, or play the fractal version where you can go in and control the mine or anything else. Maybe there'd even be sub parts in the mine like repairing machinery or something. The full range of macro-micromanaging would be pretty interesting.