Well, idk. It's the same thing as removing blocks. What's the main point of the game: crafting, mining, building and exploring...or just mining for 10 minutes to get just enough ore for a section of your base / holding left click for half an hour in order to scrap your old design and start from scratch?
I don't see the point in making huge waiting times for crafting/mining/removing, and I think mining was good as it were before: you could dig big holes and drain the resource spots completely in around 5 minutes or less.
If anything, make a difficulty/custom game screen like in Space Engineers. I probably have 5 hours of actual gameplay (exploring, designing, fighting, building, landing without landing gear for science, letting gravity bring me to the ground and see if things explode, etc) and 25 hours of crafting, queueing stuff, mining, managing inventory, etc.
I'm hoping it won't be like this later on.
And yep, the final "Alien Base" is a pretty big fight. I sniped all the turrets easily with twin plasma cannons, even though they instantly destroyed a few directional thrusters as I derp-dodged the lag-barrage. But going inside took me a good amount of reloads because I kept screwing something up or blowing the Fuel Tanks up.
My "end-game" ship is a 5 Rail Guns 4 Plasma Cannons one.
But I didn't do anything creative with it really. And I didn't build a Capital Ship since I tested one in the creative mode and they are currently useless/a pain to build.
Alien Base:
Invading:
Finding Paul:
Overkill (had to remove the Gatlings as they wouldn't fire since I think you can only have up to 9 guns):
Returning to base:
Don't get me wrong, I had good fun and all. I just think there's a whole lot of work to do before the game makes any sense, and I remember reading the devs were planning to release the game late 2015...and well, it's already late 2015, and I don't think they can finish it even by late 2016.
Something about their overly positive predictions makes my intuition say "Danger".
PS: You probably know that already, but if you aim at structures with a sniper/assault/pulse/laser rifle, it will show the structure/ship name on the HUD.
So you can know if you found the Lost Outpost or the Alien Base or the Habitat etc people talk about.
PS2: Rail Guns and Pulse Lasers now fire auto, albeit at a must lower rate of fire than most guns. Not sure if they changed or something, but it seems like they did.
Rails are great for sniping without making holes everywhere, and the Pulse Laser is like a no-ammo, much weaker variant of a Rail Gun.
I believe Rail Guns will be expensive to fire, so I'm not sure if having lots of them will be interesting later on. I think it used to take 5 Rail shots on a turret to kill it, that's why I put 5 there.
I also think the personal Laser Rifle is kinda of bad. IIRC it fires semi-auto and fires a weird projectile. It's like a mix between Tier 2 Sniper and Pulse Rifle.
Not that knowledge of weapons make any difference at this point, but I'm interested to seeing how they'll change it as the game develops. Pretty cool to have some choice of weapons.