I think Steve has made clear what he wants the new system to do. Especially from a gameplay perspective, this is imho a good solution to the current wealth-related problems.
The misunderstanding and arguments against probably mostly come from the difference somebody imagines by thing described as wealth and the system Steve would like to implement. I find it difficult to understand, that the players spending on military construction would increase the general "wealth" (seen as money/food for those hivemind races/...) of the players empire. The population working in these facilities does increase the gouverments capability in (primarily military) construction and power, but they have to been paid/cared for with the gouverments "wealth"(money/food/...).
Therefore, I think, that one could simply rename the system from wealth to something like military ressources or industrial/gouverment capacity. I am sadly very bad at finding suitable names, but others in this thread have proposed similiar thing, so I hope the general direction I mean is clear.
"gouverment ressources" would represent the sum of the capbility of an empire to construct and maintain space and military forces and their supporting logistics foundation (logistics, stateowned feighters, terraformers, ...). This would primarly be the population working in gouverment facilities. An empire needs qualified personel and mines to keep the factories and shipyards running, so mines and financial centres provide more "gouverment ressources" than they consume, while the factories need more "gouverment ressources" than they provide when they construct new things. If the CFs lay idle, they increase "gouverment ressources" by producing things needed for maintanence of facilites or something else.
This would imho neatly solve the issues some here have with the new "wealth" by simply renaming it to something more appropriate for the desired system.
If somebody thinks the name "financial centre" does not fit in this system, it could be renamed to something showing it generates "gouverment ressources". Maybe "specialist training centre" or "bureaucractic department".
The former "wealth" (money/food/...) needed to support the workers would be no longer needed and is abstractet away, as the population not available for (military) gouverment (means not available for the manufacturing sector) would pay the taxes, which can be assumed to be enough to "pay" the manufacturing pops. As such it is no longer needed. Maybe the service sector pop can provide a small amount of "gouverment ressources" representing private manufacturing, research, mining operations, or something similiar.
Here is the original post by Iceranger, which I wanted to support. He has calculated whats practically cunsumes produces these "gouverment ressources" more detailed:
It looks to me that the new wealth model looks more like power than economy, depending on how much 'wealth' we can get from taxes on civs, which is largely out of player's control.
Based on current numbers:
Financial centers: power generator, generates 3x power per million workers
Refineries, mines: small power generator, generates 0.5x power per million workers
Factories, labs: small power consumers, consumes 0.5x power per million workers
Military stuff: large power consumers, consumes (7/8)x (?) power per million workers
To balance your book (without considering civ income, assuming the same worker requirement as in VB6):
1 financial center can support 6 factories, 1 mine can support 1 factories
(10/3) financial centers are needed to support 1 lab
about 26 financial centers are needed to support one 18kt military shipyard (based on the new shipyard worker model)
We may as well rename wealth to power, and then we can have more ways of generating it, rather than only have the choice of building financial centers or cancelling industry jobs.
I do not know if this power was meant to represent electrical energy, or power in the sense of capacity, but maybe military or gouverment power could be a fitting name.
I hope somebody else can help with finding new, better fitting names than "gouverment ressources".
I also hope I could made clear what I ment, and would like to explain it some more, if not.
After this proposal I have only one questions left:
Do you intent to keep some racial modifiers for construction and "wealth" generation? So could we have empires, which need a much larger number of workers to have the same effect, maybe with a smaller impact on planetary population capacity per individual?
And as a long time lurker, I want to use these opportunity to say Thank you and congratulate on the game you are creating, Steve.