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What are some tips for getting through the awful slog of having to reposition everything (or a large number of things) in an area?

Construction bots....and a good dose of early planning

Depends on the situation. Do I want to upgrade from chemical furnaces to electrical ones? Deconstruction , then fill the space with blueprinted designs and have the bots handle the rest. Do I need to move my labs since I'm moving from the belted red-green-blue research to the 7 typed mess it is now? Deconstruct the labs, place a few logistics chests on the disconnected science production lines and move everything in place using blueprints. Do I need to expand electronics production? Leave the old low-volume stuff in place as an auxiliary production facility and just build the new thing from scratch. Decommission an old played-out mining outpost? Grab a car or train, deconstruct everything using personal bots, then shove it all into the car's hold or in a train wagon. The reverse is useful for building too.
Bottom line though, use construction bots for mass-constructing or deconstructing stuff. Factorio is all about automating things - if you're repeatedly doing the same thing manually, it'll typically have a way for you to be lazy about it.

What I'm doing is building up a much larger factory around a central staging area on the railworld setting, and I feel like I get lost or confused on what needs to do next. Progress is always slow for me once the game picks up pace.

Fill a Power Armor of your choice with Fusion/Solar and Roboports. Blueprint/Deconstruct the base until you're blue in the face, or until you've run out of ramen.

I usually move my base bit by bit. First I build new smelters and send the plates to the old base (so I can crank up production of circuites for modules ), then I start to move the intermediats (same, sent them to the old base for modules ).
In the end I usually rip off my old base and move somewhere else where I build a make everything factory.

Planning is the key and you'll only plan well with continued game experience. Learn from your own mistakes. Watch videos and learn from other people's mistakes. Pick and choose your favorite bits and incorporate them into your next design.

But if you do find yourself needing to make massive changes, then construction bots and the deconstruction planner are easiest. If it's severe enough I usually just ditch that game and start up a new one.

I play with the expectation of rebuilding my entire base from scratch several times:
First time, when I get construction robots (and usually quarter laser walls, or at least hardpoints where biters come from)
Second time, when I build my main train station. I try to plan this into the first teardown, with varying degrees of success. Usually try to plan out 10 lines (2x iron, 2x copper, stone, coal, oil, personal shuttle, supply train, free line) with enough space to have two trains backed up for each one.
Third+ time, Late game rebuilds for efficiency (when ~100 electric furnaces with P3 each covered by 10 beacons with S3, giving +40% production and +370% crafting speed) doesn't cut it anymore.

I'll attach an example save file for teardown #1: You'll notice that I basically rushed roboports, and my factory is right now fairly inefficient and can barely keep up. The nice thing about teardowns is that they effectively remove pollution for the duration, so it's a viable strategy even when you're having trouble holding the walls. Also note the large land grab, giving me plenty of expansion room (which, incidentally, was not enough for my rebuild in this particular case).

Steambirds wrote:What I'm doing is building up a much larger factory around a central staging area on the railworld setting, and I feel like I get lost or confused on what needs to do next. Progress is always slow for me once the game picks up pace.

Often this stage for me is where I begin segregating. Often on Rail centric maps I move science to its own base and train in Plate. I do similar with oil, power, smelting, etc...

So instead of continuing to build on top of my main base I move things out of it. Then i have space to rearange and optimize.

Steambirds wrote:What are some tips for getting through the awful slog of having to reposition everything (or a large number of things) in an area?

Keep your current factory producing stuff for you. Move a little ways up/down/left/right and start a new factory. You can always tear down the previous factory later. I never understood why some folks tear down a factory before the new one is ready.

To reuse the materials, of course!

When I tear down a factory, I usually wait for one of two things: a lazy few days in Real Life (tm) during which I don't really care about output, or I let my stockpiles get to the point where I can leave my science running while I go do my rebuilds. It's not like I have a time limit (see: 700 stock of red/green and a bunch of unresearched red/green techs in the save file above), so I figure the best way to go leaves me with a bunch of extra furnaces lying around.

EDIT: I also pretty much exclusively play on very high/very rich/very frequent enemy bases, so moving up or down or side to side is a bit harder than one would expect.

I'm not done yet, but will probably post some of this ideas in the future.

Right now, inspired by this FFF I've started constructing endgame setups and downgrade them stepwise to the beginner stage of the game. I've outline the maximum required space (endgame is often smaller than midgame) during the process with hazard patches and placed them in every blueprint. Doing so, I can layout huge areas of my map and connect each and every belt in a way, it would not be moved (but sometime replaced, I mark these sections as well).
I am working in parallel on this concepts for science pack production, smelting, circuits and general machinery(belts, inserters, ...) ... takes more time than I can spend ^

example:
additional hint: I found out too late, that I should have had placed the train stations for unloading very early while working on this concepts ...

With the addition of nukes I've decided to give each old factory an explosive send-off to celebrate the completion of the new one. This quickly clears the space for reclamation with having to manage/move/sort/store massive amounts of inventory.

Delwack wrote:With the addition of nukes I've decided to give each old factory an explosive send-off to celebrate the completion of the new one. This quickly clears the space for reclamation with having to manage/move/sort/store massive amounts of inventory.

I did that accidentally. I wanted to shoot that one little biter that was attacking my base where I had no turrets. Oops, wrong weapon was selected.

I'm playing on a Trainworld preset and trying to build a modular, train based base. Everything is designed into a square with 4 turnarounds in the corners and up to 8 train stops, 1-2 per side. Sides with just one stop can have a waiting bay instead of the second stop. The idea is to design modules like an electronic circuit factory that takes trains of iron plates and copper plates at a reasonable speed and outputs trains of electronic circuits. And all those modules have the same train network on their outside and can be tiled any way needed. Need more electronic circuits, just blue print a new square somewhere near an iron and copper smelter.

What I hope I can do is to move those modules around, moving the simpler things like electronic circuits towards the resources and make more space for complex things in the middle. And generally grow the base as needed.

Then I rebuild everything. Typically I make first a small starter base. When I get trains and bots I begin to build an actual base. First I have all operations except mining in one base. When it grows, I move iron and copper smelting to separate factory. Then steel smelting and green circuit production. In my opinion it is too impractical to build final base from beginning. Tearing down of old small production plants and building new large high capacity plants is standard procedure in industry and it fits well in the game too. Any small company will not build a huge empty factory and think that we have room for expansions when our company grows to international megacompany.

I want to make things as realistically as practically possible even there are some other Factorio-optimal ways to do things. Flaws in realism which are not necessary for gaming are annoying things which decrease the entertainment value.

Generally I quit in exasperation.

Then a few hours later I start the game back up and get to it.