My main gripe was fixed in this patch. Planting and harvesting with the agricultural tower can now be controlled with separate conditions. So now there is a better way to avoid wasting so much fruit and therefore, reduce spore pollution.

People don't like Gleba because it forces you to play differently and not just re-do the optimized builds over again.

It seems like the developer intent based on spores and spoil times and farm space constraints is to harvest small amounts as needed and build just in time products. But the tools to do that a suck, and the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles. If products stop moving, you are kinda fucked because there is no good way to distinguish between fresh and nearly spoiled goods other than simple inserter priority rules.

It all works but feels wrong and dumb.

Its not gleba i mind so much as the impact of spoilage. We could have the interesting effects of spoilage on the factory, without the impact of spoilage on transportation. End products, like science, shouldn't spoil. We can put eggs in a Biochamber, and then put that biochamber in our pocket and it doesn't spoil. Huh. And then we can take that egg out of the biochamber, unspoiled. But we can't put eggs in a crate and have them not spoil. Tedious.

Gleba was the only planet I really struggled with getting started on, mainly due to the spoilage mechanic. Felt like I was always manually 'jump starting' things at first because something got spoiled and stuck somewhere. Once I finally got a good production loop going though things got much easier.

The main thing I took away from it, was to not be afraid to burn anything that can be burned if things got overproduced, otherwise they would get stuck on the belts and become spoiled. My end setup had lots of looping belts and sorters to dispose of excess production of spoilable products