I know everyone says that house quality doesn't matter, but I disagree. I am following the "Port Austral" model of domain building where you build lots of quality houses that give +5 or +6 happiness and then you have tons of specialized units (spinners, ropemakers, pork butchers, etc.) who park themselves in their shop on one of those quality houses. The happiness boost allows them to churn out far more products automatically due to them hitting their max happiness faster. The automation for these specialist units work pretty well as they don't lose much stamina for each production run. Plus the resources they use are often limited and so it's okay if they aren't running 24/7.
Automation is definitely a big part of my future in this game. I'm already at a point where I basically never click on my welldiggers, hunters, gardeners, woodcutters, etc. I'll probably end up building way more woodcutters, quarrymen, brickmakers, farmers, etc. than I actually need, just due to wanting to flood the domain with automated workers who are accomplishing the jobs I need done.
Figuring out what jobs and industries are best for automation is kind of fun, actually.
And at a certain point you should be making a bunch of stuff yourself, to where you never have to think about it. I've clicked on "buy nails" a few hundred times. Meanwhile I have high quality slate on every building and I never think about it, because I gather it myself automatically.
I think the UI is decent given how complex the game is. Obviously it would be nice to be able to queue a bunch of jobs.