Running through my old campaign with the new wealth rules one thing really sticks out at me.
Previously a major reason to colonize, was that smaller worlds have a higher population growth which is quite reasonable, but also they're more efficient with their manufacturing industry, a 100 million person coloniy has almost double the manufacturing industry as the default 500 million earth.
I would argue that this makes sense, as the colony has major investment being made to it, its industries are more focused, and theres little bureaucratic and social inertia moving for secondary industries, such as service and financial industries, as well as leasure, recreation, etc. They're just more efficient and you're not going to waste major resources moving people who aren't immediately employable into those colonies.
But with the new wealth mechanics now those smaller colonies also represent a significantly higher potential income, you could double your tax revenue, but you do still need to have the facilities available to take advantage of this.
I was a bit concerned at first, but it makes sense, if the people out there are in fact focused in manufacturing in a purely efficient manner than it stands to reason there should be economic benefits to making good use of the industry sent out.
Something else I noticed is that if I'm not mistaken construction factories produce half what they cost to run, and mines produce the same amount but cost nothing to run.
This means as long as you have enough mines your economy is pretty safe, also when earth inevitably runs out of minerals you'll still have the income from the mines even with no useful TNE production, I could assume they're still mining valuable non TNEs for the civilian economy.
Of course leaving those mines in place is just inefficient in respect of the wasted mining potential but its nice to know that just like CMC's on almost depleted worlds they're still useful for income.
The more I look at the numbers the more I like the potential these changes has.