TL;DR
Overhaul the UI for the deconstruction planner to be more streamlined, orthogonal, and easier to useWhat ?
The deconstruction planner should be changed to be easier to choose different classes of things to deconstruct. The 'trees and rocks' toggle is just a hack to cover up a deeper difficulty.There should instead be a category tab that allows you to toggle whole classes of things on or off. These classes should be things like 'trees', 'rocks', 'cliffs', 'train stuff', 'fluid stuff', 'manufacturing stuff', 'logistics stuff', 'bot stuff', and 'power stuff'. Pushing them should result in the filter either selecting everything in that category, or if anything is already selected in that category, deselecting it all. The color of the button should indicate which it will do when pressed.
Ghosts and items on the ground should be changed into some kind of three-state toggle.
Ghosts - Ghosts only, ghosts and non-ghosts, non-ghosts only
Items on ground - Items on ground only, items on ground and built items, built items only
Both three-state toggles should default to 'both'.
Tiles should be handled like anything else. The default deconstruction planner should not have tiles selected. The case of using a default configured deconstruction planner on just tiles actually selecting the tiles can be maintained.
The whitelist/blacklist toggle is still good and should remain.
Why ?
The current deconstruction planner seems like kind of a hodge podge. The 'trees and rocks' option seems nice at first, but I almost inevitably end up creating a planner that has every single tree and rock painstakingly filtered so I can easily add other things to the list.And people are asking for the trees and rocks toggle to also affect cliffs, and I myself am often annoyed that it doesn't affect fish.
The way ghosts work is confusing. And there are times I would like to do something like 'remove all inserter ghosts' or something similar, and there is no real way to do that.
I think this makes the planner conceptually much cleaner and makes it easy to combine various filters with trees and rocks. Also, being able to do things like "Remove all train stuff" could be very useful in a lot of circumstances, and if the deconstruction planner is changed to fit this suggestion, it fits in a very conceptually clean way with the idea of trees or rocks.
Lastly, sometimes I want to to deconstruct just trees, or just rocks, and right now I have no choice but to carefully pick out each tree and rock type.