Basically if I had to TL;DR my post : AI sucks in this game. Colonists are dumb as fuck, in many, many ways. It's a super fun game, has some troubles with balance imo, but otherwise really addictive to build your little colony and face the rimstruggles. But the fact that your pawns keep wasting time and that there is usually no way to adress structural flaws in your colony other than getting mods or micro-managing to extreme levels where it becomes unfun, well ... that just sucks.
Example : cleaning area = firefighting area but if you want to firefight around your power conduits that lead to a geothermal generator, you'll need to clean there as well, so instead you micromanage every time there's a fire there by adding and removing little home areas - nobody could call this proper gameplay.
Another one : your cook for some reason keeps walking into your freezer, hauling 10 meat, making a meal, and hauling the meal back. Stupid. So, you create 2 storage areas near your stove so that the cook can use meat directly next to the stove and place the product directly to the other side of the stove and transform into a super efficient cooking robot. But then you've got piles of meals and meat rotting next to the stove. So, you micro-manage the meat storage so that when your cook's not cookin', the meat goes back into the freezer. But your hauler's stoooopid and won't touch the damn meat that needs to be moved 3 feet from where it is, and would rather haul some clothes from low-storage to high-storage or re-stack some steel even though it doesn't matter at all, so you manually tell him to move the damn meat. But yet another problem arises : your hauling guy is still dumb as fuck and when your cook's cookin', he will keep restocking 10 meat to your meat pile and hauling 1 meal back to the freezer. Back to square one. Eventually, you have to de-assign re-assign your hauler all the time, or manually tell him to haul those damn components that have been sitting at the edge of the map for weeks, or restrict him to an area which includes everything except your cooking stove areas so that he can finally stop wasting time. I don't think anybody would call this proper gameplay either.
But coding good AI is annoying and difficult and I understand why you'd just let it be because "it works, kind of". And maybe you could even consider it "added flavor". Like "hey you not only have to face freak toxic fallout events and bands of half-naked mace-wielding psychopaths but you also need to do all this while managing a bunch of imbeciles that have no idea how to do their job !". The "bug or feature" question, basically.
In any case, I agree to the fact that pawns spending half their day just hauling stuff around terribly inefficiently is mind boggingly frustrating ... at least to me. I caved in and installed pick up and haul a while ago, because I couldn't take it anymore. I don't know about fairly minimal time investment but I agree that the game would benefit greatly. Another question is "if a mod already does it, does it really need to be added to the official version ?" and I'm not sure what the answer is.
Example : cleaning area = firefighting area but if you want to firefight around your power conduits that lead to a geothermal generator, you'll need to clean there as well, so instead you micromanage every time there's a fire there by adding and removing little home areas - nobody could call this proper gameplay.
Another one : your cook for some reason keeps walking into your freezer, hauling 10 meat, making a meal, and hauling the meal back. Stupid. So, you create 2 storage areas near your stove so that the cook can use meat directly next to the stove and place the product directly to the other side of the stove and transform into a super efficient cooking robot. But then you've got piles of meals and meat rotting next to the stove. So, you micro-manage the meat storage so that when your cook's not cookin', the meat goes back into the freezer. But your hauler's stoooopid and won't touch the damn meat that needs to be moved 3 feet from where it is, and would rather haul some clothes from low-storage to high-storage or re-stack some steel even though it doesn't matter at all, so you manually tell him to move the damn meat. But yet another problem arises : your hauling guy is still dumb as fuck and when your cook's cookin', he will keep restocking 10 meat to your meat pile and hauling 1 meal back to the freezer. Back to square one. Eventually, you have to de-assign re-assign your hauler all the time, or manually tell him to haul those damn components that have been sitting at the edge of the map for weeks, or restrict him to an area which includes everything except your cooking stove areas so that he can finally stop wasting time. I don't think anybody would call this proper gameplay either.
But coding good AI is annoying and difficult and I understand why you'd just let it be because "it works, kind of". And maybe you could even consider it "added flavor". Like "hey you not only have to face freak toxic fallout events and bands of half-naked mace-wielding psychopaths but you also need to do all this while managing a bunch of imbeciles that have no idea how to do their job !". The "bug or feature" question, basically.
In any case, I agree to the fact that pawns spending half their day just hauling stuff around terribly inefficiently is mind boggingly frustrating ... at least to me. I caved in and installed pick up and haul a while ago, because I couldn't take it anymore. I don't know about fairly minimal time investment but I agree that the game would benefit greatly. Another question is "if a mod already does it, does it really need to be added to the official version ?" and I'm not sure what the answer is.