I think I like vanilla more than Space Age

[mmmPI]

Devs added in 2.1 things like interplanteray signals transmission, plaform to platform transfer, alongside the cargobay loaders and some combinators functionnalities, and other things i'm forgotting which to me indicate that they are not trying to force one specific way to play.

They did remove space casino since the thread was opened, it's the only thing i find unfortunate, which i feel was done for the opposite reason, to make the gameplay more diverse, at the cost of removing that one fun method that is "mod-only" currently

[meganothing]

I see it this way: Factorio 1 was a huge single (sand-)box filled with 100 toys. For Space Age they decided to make about 6 boxes, called them planets and platform, but since the game should not take that much longer, they made the boxes smaller and distributed 150 toys over those six boxes, 25 on average. Even though the variance of toys is better, any single box doesn't have the feel of that huge single box.

And that is fine IMHO. Space Age is worse for mega-factory players for example, but better for players like me who I would call tinkerer. Since everyone still has the choice to play an upgraded Factorio 1 and include mods I don't really see winners and losers here.