2) I can decide not to put a building into the bonus slot if I so choose. I can decide to use adjacency buildings like mineral processing to achieve the same effect as energy.
Mineral Processing (Plant) is not an adjacency building. It's a planet-wide bonus, which is just one more instance my point: Stellaris undercuts its own Tile system instead of using it. Most of the bonus buildings use planet-wide bonuses, not adjacency bonuses. In a game of planet-wide bonuses, why does the physical relationship of the Tiles matter? It doesn't. Of course, yes, the exception is capitals. But the size of the effect just isn't enough to matter. Even if you intentionally ruined your physical layout, your research would be 100% the same, and your minerals/food/power would be basically unaffected (maximum 8 different over the entire planet).
Giving a planet +2 energy that you get regardless of whether you build a building on the right spot does in fact remove options. Placing and clicking provides more visual interaction with the game world. Making decisions adds a level of strategy to the game, and while it might be thin to you or I, it creates a system to learn and master. A slot system that just places pops where they should ideally go removes this as well.
Well, "thin" kind of gives it away, doesn't it? But ok, I see your point, especially when it comes to food/research deposits, as you inevitably build over those at some point. Fine.
But that doesn't get to the real point, does it? If the Tiles were 25x1 instead of 5x5, that wouldn't affect Tiles deposits, would it? The spatial relationship doesn't matter in the current implementation of buildings and Tiles.
That doesn't even get into things like unique buildings that don't affect Power/Minerals/Research.
So... Unity? Other than that there literally are no buildings that don't affect Power/Minerals/Research. Which is another failing of the current system.
3) I don't need to count mines. I need to count minerals. Your reference to counting mines in nonsensical, because number of mines does not equal number of minerals.
YES! That's exactly the point!
And how did you get to the minerals?
By building Mining Networks. You had to enact, repeatedly, a specific set of actions: building and upgrading mines. And the number of times you do that is absurdly tedious - or, to use your own words, nonsensical. You are exactly right that there is nothing important or interesting about how many mines you built! But THAT'S the gameplay. That's the thing you have to do when you engage with the building system. Click Build Mine and Upgrade Mine X number of times until you've filled up all the Tiles you want to devote to mines.
Your described slot system is in and of itself intrinsically extraneous, because without tiles there is no reason to have pops. You only need sliders for Power/Minerals/Research as you build buildings. A slot system adds exactly nothing to the game, removes visual engagement, and removes options that do in fact exist whether you find them worthwhile or not.
If the current system is so "boneheadedly simple" then what possible benefit could you find in measurably removing depth from it?
First, of course you can (and should) have pops without Tiles - that's
exactly what MOO2 does. And second, you could also very well have just sliders and no pops - that's what the original MOO did, and it worked fine. But you've totally misunderstood what I'm saying.
I AM NOT saying that they should just switch a slot system like MOO2. I am saying that Tiles, as implemented, don't add anything to the game beyond what slots add except the tedium of clicking on specific Tiles over and over.
My point isn't that Tiles
should be removed from the game. My solution is that there should be vastly more and better adjacency interactions between building and pops so that the system actually takes advantage of its sole redeeming feature: spatial relationships between pops and buildings on the planet grid. But the current system barely acknowledges the Tiles at all.