Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I could make people play Factorio as some kind of training. My son (9), who showed me the game, spent the longest time building parts manually. I kept showing him how to automate, but it didn't really "click" until I was pumping out solid lines of green potions in front of him, then he understood the magic of automation. It felt oddly similar to interactions with various business departments. "Look, we're neve…
I mean, expecting a 9-year-old to grasp a production process completely, then conceive of automating it seems a bit optimistic.
The pain, in Factorio terms, is having to sit there not doing anything. Boring. Once you set up an assembler to do it for you, suddenly you can fill that time with whatever you want to. The simple problem/solution/reward loop Factorio presents around automation works remarkably well.
Optimization, however, is harder to teach.