This is why I got bored of Dyson Sphere Program. Once you travel to other solar systems, all you get are resources that let you skip certain production chains. The proliferator spray then made direct insertion inefficient.

The planets in Factorio have new buildings, new mechanics, and certain resources are cheap while others are more scarce.

I've played factorio since version 0.3 and modded Minecraft since 1.0. I've always lamented the points in any playthrough where a new feature makes the old way of doing things obsolete - but in Factorio in particular, it has never actually turned out very bad. There is always enough gameplay in the next abstraction tier that it hasn't made the game boring, although it does change what it is. The ladder starts when you get burner miners (extremely early) and you never have to mine by hand again. When you get electric miners you never have to refuel them by hand again. Those are already drastic gameplay shifts you experience within the first 20 minutes. It only keeps going from there - construction bots, solar power, logistics bots. The switch from handcrafting machines to having your factory craft them for you. Oil processing. Advanced oil processing. Trains. Power armour. Modules. Quality.

In Angel's Mods, much more than in the base game, there are so many of these points where your old factory process line is obsolete and your best option is to completely dismantle it and build the newer process you just unlocked, although the old one can keep running until you get around to that. It's a nonstop circus of redesigning and rebuilding. They haven't introduced any fundamentally new mechanics mind you - that all just comes from expansions in the set of recipes and machines available (and there's a reason every Angel's modpack includes Helmod). I've never tried Pyanodon's. Bob's Inserters also makes you want to redesign your layouts every time you unlock new inserter directions.

Part of the game is designing copy-pastable layouts that you can just repeat in a row, or tile in a grid - once you get to the stage where that's practical to do. You don't build each copy individually, you let your bots do it. If your bots can't do it then make it so they can, before you can say you're at this milestone. Also trains make grid patterns or "city blocks" very practical.

> In general, I get bored when I've figured out the solution to a problem but it takes a long time to get it implemented.

Not a factory game, but the designers of Portal 2 talked about this. They noticed that in the first game there were puzzles where people would figure out what to do, but then get stuck on actually being able to do it, which was frustrating. So for the second game they endeavored to make it so that the challenge was always in the solution to the puzzle, never in executing the solution.