I've been playing 4x games before "4x" became a thing...

Same thing that happened with Civ, imo, is happening here - the makers forgot that a lot of people play games for the fun of playing.

What's not fun, micromanagement of everything.

What else isn't fun, arbitrary limits.  For example, for the first 30 turns of the game, the colony limit is 4 before negative things happen.  Can't put off selecting a government, gotta pick one of the two available and it sticks for TWENTY SIX LONG BORING TURNS.

Not only is the 4 colony limit totally arbitrary, so are the 26 turns.

I've put up with the nerfing of the game now for several iterations (food, moral, admins, etc) and some better things (not building a zillion spacestations) and learned to adapt.

I love playing on very large maps with a few opponents set to a higher AI so I can expand rapidly.

Now, with the 1 pop floor on the colony ships, the admins, the colony limit to happiness, the game just isn't fun anymore, or, more accurately:

Stardock is telling me I am playing the game wrong (after playing it since GCIII was in prerelease beta)

I'm on my fifth playing of the game so far and I can't stomach getting much past the first age before I lose interest (and my civ is a 4% happiness and I've got 16 turns before I can switch to the next government).  I've adapted to, instead of researching useful tech, I'm now researching government tech to get to the ones where I can have colonies.  But, still, I have to wait forever until I get to the next "you're allowed to change" government period.

Last nerfing of the planet population cap, food, and legions thing - I got a mod that removed a lot of that stupid stuff and let the game play be fun.  Now I have to wait for someone to come up with a mod that undoes the stupid arbitrary limits of governments and the rapid degradation of moral so the game can, again, be fun.