This was pretty big, at least to me, and it took ages. Especially because it was done a long time ago now before mods existed. I died numerous times making this thing because I couldn't fly via mods yet :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/bu8ljr/i_built_a_supercomputer/
When I was done building that, I was indeed satisfied. But I also was burned out on the game because I had just spent many many hours placing foundation after foundation and wall after wall. I had earned my manual stripes, and now I wanted to be more efficient in my next projects. Something that I think Ficsit™ would support. But those tools are not available...
To me, when you transition from building big one piece at a time to building big with blueprints, you're choosing as a player to focus more on the macro as opposed to the micro. Can I make these now large scale systems work efficiently and eliminate bottlenecks as I find them, as opposed to can I make these handful of individual machines work efficiently.
This is crude but basic human nature - if this one thing I did was fun and satisfying, I want more of it and usually at larger scale. If all I do is the same thing over and over, I tire of it and move on to other things.
You guys have a really great progression system in the game in terms of tiers and the space elevator - an area that probably needs tweaking over time but is really rewarding to every player I've ever seen play. People are genuinely happy when they unlock the next tier and get access to new stuff.
Where you don't have any progression at all today is in the methods you use to build things. Whether you're just starting and still smacking an iron node by hand all the way to you've got all tiers unlocked, a global train system, the majority of nodes tapped and supplying, etc etc you're still building everything one piece at a time like a rookie...
For the number of items making your PC die concern, sounds like your engineers need to get creative :) That is a dev problem to solve to at least some degree, and players that choose to go big are usually quite aware of the tradeoffs that will come and find ways to limit or workaround while still accomplishing what they want. Look at that other game you just learned about, people build insanely big there and it brings their machines to a crawl. Those game devs optimize as much as they can, but also tell the community "you did it to yourself".
devtrackers.gg