These were all things the AI couldn't do, now you can't either!! You see how strong that makes it?

1)  Is planet specialization even useful now?  It looks like the U/I forces us to make general planets now as there does not seem to be any way to designate all production going toward any one specialty.

2)  Is there just one big pool now where all planets send their resources?

3) Is there any way to designate resources sent to a ship yard?  What if I want one shipyard to work hard and another to hardly work?

4) What about new planets and their production?  I always want new planets to go full on facilities production and not spend anything on wealth or research, is this even possible now?

5) Is there any documentation that explains how the new system is supposed to work?

I am not sure where you get the idea that not having 100% allocation affects specialization.  GalCiv 2 had a focus based economy management and is known to respond well to planet specialization.  Why would that change?

Planets send their manufacturing resources to their sponsored shipyards.  Why do you think that changed?

There are now limitations to what you can accomplish and micromanage.  However, there is still much you can accomplish.  It requires creativity and experimentation.  I think I have found a few tricks, but I wouldn't want to deprive anyone of the joy of exploring new facets of the game.  Besides, I am probably wrong.

Lastly, documentation is an interesting issue and possibly the most valid of the list of complaints.  I am not sure what Stardock could really do about it with the software under such active development.  I have tech writer acquaintances that would testify to the delay lag inherent in getting coherent documentation together.  It also becomes a full time job for multiple people and adds greatly to the demands on programming teams.  Stardock has said they would rather spend their HR resources working on software and art assets and so forth.  Many fans agree.  So, for documentation you are back to mining these forums or exploring and learning, both of which I enjoy, so I don't know what to tell you.

With focuses, specialization still wins. 

Let's do some numbers. In all cases, 3 planets with 100 production and 900% bonuses. Also, the results aren't totally accurate, as there's 1% unaccounted for on the 33/33/33 global wheel, but they give a good enough indication.

Set 1: 1 econ specialized, 1 manu, 1 research, global wheel set to 33/33/33

Each planet produces 580 of it's focused resource, and 21 of it's other resources, for a total output of 622 per planet or 1866 total.

Set 2: same setup, but each planet has a 300% bonus to each.

Each world produces 232 of it's focused resource, and 84 for each of it's non-focused resources, for a total of 400/planet or 1200 total - a massive reduction.

Set 3: same setup as example 1, but with 50/50 research manu on the global wheel.

The research and Manu planets now each produce 750 of their main resource and 25 of one off resource, and the Econ world produces 250 econ and 38 each of manu/research. Total output is 775 for two planets and 325 for the third, for a total of 1876 (the 10 extra here is that 1% I mentioned earlier) - the same as #1.

Set #4: Same setup as Set 3, but planets have 300% bonus to each production type.

Research and manu planets produce 300/100/0. Econ planet produces 152/100/152. Grand total is 1204 (again, the slight difference from set 2 here is from the missing 1%)

These all assume an even split between the three world, though. Set 3, if we ditch change the Econ world to a Research of Industry planet, becomes much more powerful than set 1. But they still remain much better specialized than split, as we can see from the difference between set 3 and set 4.

Specialization remains king.