There's a lot to say about this. The below will ramble a bit, for which I apologize. My purpose below is just to share a piece of my point of view. In this post I'll explain why many of the things you see requested won't be worked on. I don't expect everyone to agree with everything I write, but I hope you at least understand where I'm coming from.

When a suggestion comes up a lot from different sources, I take it really seriously. However these days, the things that people tend to mention in the context of "it has to be in the game or it's not finished" tend to be specific to the player who is suggesting them.

Just look at the responses to this post, for example. There is zero overlap between suggestions. /u/NotScrollsApparently has a list of UI changes that was linked. /u/somuchdirt74 posted a system of on-map icons to express health effects (an idea we explored years ago and doesn't work and which I've actually never seen suggested before). /u/kezza596 says the game "MUST" have a 64-bit implementation. Others are demanding Z-levels. And that's just a handful of people. Now extend that to hundreds of thousands of people.

My job is to serve RimWorld players as a whole. That includes super hardcore players with 200 mods, who know every detail of the UI and want more ultra-power user options to make everything more automated, faster, fewer clicks, more fluent. It also includes the 76-year old grandmas and 10-year-old kids who email me to thank me for making a game they can actually play. It includes the people who talk on forums, and the great silent majority who never say anything online at all.

I have to make changes that help a lot of those people without hurting any of them. Many power user requests, for example, would hurt new players by adding complexity that new players need to learn to avoid. Nobody wants to open a game and see 100 buttons on every menu, even if each one has a power user purpose. It's intimidating.

This significantly limits how hard I push for power user utilities.

The feedback state of the game has actually been mostly the same for years: A large faction of players saying they're happy with it as is being final, and others who each have some specific thing that they believe must go in before it can be finished. And those specific things are usually very different from person to person. Over the years we've implemented many of those specific things, but it doesn't really matter; even if we make the game fun for 80 hours instead of 60, players still reach the same point where they feel something is missing. It's an inherent problem with a play-forever style of game like this.

Games with definitive endings and no replay expectation (e.g. Portal) don't have this issue. But we are on an endless treadmill because the game by its very nature always gets boring for every player. (RW's average playtime on SteamSpy is 92 hours, by the way, which is exceptionally high).

So there's other issues in play here too. One is that many of the ideas that get demanded really aren't actionable. Often they are logically impossible, or incomplete, or push on one side of a tradeoff without accounting for the other side.

I hate to single anyone out here, but I need examples. /u/NotScrollsApparently 's linked post for example is mixed in this respect:

"some stuff (like planting options) are in a practically randomly sorted lists in which it's hard to find a particular item."

This is a good thought IMO and we've taken steps to solve it for the next version already (fewer redundant tree options). Sorting better would be nice too. He picked out this one well.

(That said, if the order of plants in the plant selection menu is a significant part of the "must be changed or the game isn't finished" list of features, I'd say we're doing pretty well. It's a real thing, and a good idea, but it's also a tiny thing. This sort of thing gets polished on finished games all the time(e.g. see how much polish a game like StarCraft 2 had after release. It doesn't mean the game wasn't finished on release.)

"Zone manipulation is all over the place - some things can be done in restrict-manage area, some zones have multiple buttons while others have dropdown lists when you click them. Some have one mode (on or off), others have different options (restrict, ignore, decostruct for roofs). These should be standardized to a single location and to the same controls scheme."

There's a good core idea here, which is to condense the UI and establish patterns which repeat themselves. Unfortunately it doesn't actually cleanly map onto what's being controlled here.

Some of these controls create zones, which can be selected, created infinitely, must be contiguous, etc. E.g. Growing zones, stockpiles zones.

Some of these controls manage areas, which cannot be selected, can be painted and removed everywhere non-contiguously, and so on. E.g. Allowed area, home area

Some areas need to have more than on/off! Like roofs. The player must be able to distinguish between "build a roof here if there isn't one", "ignore whether there are roofs here", and "remove any roof here if there is one". We could put the under a sub-menu, but that doesn't seem like an improvement to me. It just adds clicks; there's enough room to show all the options without requiring more clicks, so we do.

So anyway, these different things are conceptually grouped as zones/areas but they fundamentally serve different purposes so they can't have exactly the same interface. So from my analysis right now, we can never fulfill this suggestion.

Sidebar: This is a common pattern: The suggestion expresses a vague desire for a part of the UI to be easier to use/understand, without a specific idea of how that could be so. Not all UI suggestions are like this, but some are (especially the high-level "fix the UI" suggestions). If I could request one thing of suggesters it is this: Be very, very specific about what exactly the new design should be that you want to see. Stating problems can be useful, but stating problems with solutions together advances the conversation much more!

"Work and Restrict are not clear enough and should probably be merged somehow"

But... how? In fact these were the same menu long ago; but there's not nearly enough space for all the information so they were specifically separated. It's an artificial separation, which is what /u/NotScrollsApparently noticed here, but it's also a necessary and IMO optimal tradeoff.

That's the pattern for a lot of suggestions that we won't follow: Players seeing a tradeoff and suggesting that it be unbalanced to gain one benefit without realizing that it would create a cost on the other end that's even worse. Game design, in my opinion, is often about understanding and optimizing these tradeoffs. I've not done it perfectly... but I've really tried!