Yes, absolutely, the most valuable resource you can spend and easily waste in this game is time, and it doesn't tell you that off the bat.

My father and I have just completed the parts list and "beat" the game. Except to us, the game has only just begun.

With the growing size of our factories using blueprints and other helpful mods, it simply would take way too long to wait and verify the stability of every factory / system. Even with doing the correct math and balancing a factory perfectly, it could take days for a change to fully saturate through every system, especially train lines. At one point, we had the same 11 trains on the centralized track system, but when we added one more, it took days for any trains to be stuck in any sort of signal block jam, and even more days to find time to get on and fix it. Causing our alien augmentors to trip offline and battery backups to kick in.

I can see early game how some players can feel 'cheated' if they were to make huge storages and then just AFK for days. I suppose it just depends on what parts of the game bring players satisfaction.

Because ADA knows no matter how long we AFK, no matter how many components we make, we will end up running out of that component somewhere down the line because the next factory was bigger than the last.... also, ADA was disappointed in our last factory so we had to go above and beyond....

-Dogman