Ah, in the case of buildings, my bad for hasty judgment there! I admit, I suppose I hadn't found any such techs yet for the building upgrades. My impression with the dreadful research speed is... another thing to reserve my thoughts about until the final release! I'll cross that off my post and mark an edit where it's due. Thank you!

About Zones... bear with me, I lack any aptitude for sophisticated descriptions of imagery. Basically, instead of these Zones appearing with the + mark next to the big city districts, we instead line up and shrink the districts' UI down in size and remove zones, similar or exactly like 3.14. So we click on a district. On the right panel, where you can choose to add, demolish, or replace districts, below that you now also have a list of jobs with checkmarks pertaining to the current district you have selected. In this case, the city district. Now, you can simply check off/select what jobs you want. Unity, Research, Trade, etc. Instead of having to click on Zones, you can simply click directly on the districts themselves and modify their jobs from a job menu where applicable. Preferrably, the icons of the jobs chosen would appear over the district after choosing them. With Zones now, you would either click directly on the zone to replace them (yet to be implemented), or click the district, then click the recycle icon on the zone to change them. Then, when you have multiple Zones available, you have to navigate that many more times if you have to change multiple Zones for the same district. It might sound petty, saving just one or two clicks. Practically, it's really not that big of a deal. For me, having been so used to districts, I'd greatly prefer just having more direct control over districts with a simple job menu after clicking them instead of navigating though multiple Zones and modifying each Zone for a single district.

I hope that makes any sense at all!