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A lot of great discussion in this thread. The counterintuitive disincentive to improve your colony is what I dislike most about the current difficulty curve in regards to wealth, when the natural (and I think, desired) incentive should be to improve your colony and your colonists' lives.

I think an easy way to encourage that is by changing the "Low Expectations" buff so that it decays over time, rather than with wealth. This would at least remove the counterintuitive/gamey result that your colonists can become less happy directly because of your efforts to improve their surroundings, switching it to a more straightforward scenario where they become less happy over time at a (mostly) flat rate, which you could counter in a more intuitive/natural manner by trying to improve their surroundings.

RE: raid strengths, if the wealth calculation simply weighted unused items and artwork less, that might be all that is needed to make colony improvement feel like a net boon again, when combined with a built in need to increase colonists mood over time (because "Low Expectations" decayed over time).

This is the story of the mental daze that ended my colony. I was playing Wealthy Explorer on Cassandra Extreme (tropical rainforest), and had recruited 3 capable allies, with all the essential skills well covered between us.

The base was up and running: wind powered near a patch of fertile soil, with a freezer/kitchen, dining room/workshop (sewing, machining, research), warehouse, hospital, bedrooms, and a large vacant space (recently cleared of an ancient slumbering pirate band and a hive) to be turned into more bedrooms and my endgame workshop. All of this was enclosed in a mostly wooden (but slowly turning to granite) perimeter wall, dotted with periodic sandbagged stone door ambush ports, and 3 kill zone entrance alleys.

And then a psychic ship landed 6 tiles from my dining room. Not ideal, but at least I can start the fight on my terms. So I build my 3 bits of granite wall spaced 4 tiles apart from each other, and position my shooters behind them, with the brawler waiting inside the dining room to pop out if needed.

I shoot the ship, and out pop 4 scythers. The one in front goes down pretty quickly, but the other 3 are behind the ship from my shooting position, so I maneuver from the walls to some nearby stone chunks. My best shooter with the charge rifle is KO'ed as the 2nd scyther goes down.

We trade shots with the remaining 2 scythers and my 2nd best shooter is killed by taking a second shot to the torso. I belatedly realize I have a grenade in the stockpile, and send my brawler to get it while my medic trades fire with the 2 wounded scythers.

As my brawler returns, 1 scyther wanders off for reasons unknown to attack a cooler. My medic and brawler dispatch the remaining scyther, and then kill the final scyther as it returns shortly after aborting it cooler destruction mission, for reasons just as mysterious as those instigating the mission.

After all that, my medic/researcher is bleeding out and conscious (less an eyeball), my grower/shooter is dead, my brawler/laborer is bleeding and conscious (short a kidney), my shooter/constructer/crafter is KO'ed and dying in 7 hours (short a left radius). Pretty bad, but not the end of the world either. I send the medic to do the rescue, and send my brawler to rest (it should be noted that he is incapable of medicine).

And then 1 tile from the hospital bed, my game ends and turns into a movie. My medic goes into a mental daze, dropping my shooter/constructer/crafter to the ground where he dies 5 hours later. She eventually passes out from exhaustion and bleeds to death.

My brawler had been slowly bleeding out this whole time and loses consciousness. As he is recovering, a hive infests the vacant building I recently cleared out. He eventually recovers after nearly a day and a half of being unable to move, and goes into a mental paranoia break shortly after eating his meal.

After he recovers from that, I try to have him repair the cooler (my freezer cooler, of course) and turbine which have broken down in the meantime. He repairs the freezer, grabs a component and is on his way to the turbine when he has a sadism mental break. After terrorizing our pet emu and cassowary (they self tamed), he makes his way into the hive and is eaten by a megaspider.