> - getting the wrong idea: mixing functionalities is, again, a bad idea.

I strongly disagree with this one. I love games where you have a small number of tools, but a huge number of ways to use and combine them. Using the sword to cut berry bushes, water pipes, electricity lines, etc. is just awesome. A sawmill shouldn''t just saw trees, but anything that's soft enough to be cut (like furniture). A foundry shouldn't just melt ore and gold, but anything that can be molten (like vehicles you don't need any more). The earlier proposals of combining stuff to create vehicles is also a great way to create depth.

Of course you can create a game where there is a simple chain of tools required to complete a task, and I'm sure many people would like it. I prefer the classic Clonk way (Maybe you could also call it the Minecraft way), where the rules are not simple and laid out.

An argument for the "more complexity" way is that you can still always create a simple, shallow scenario in a deep game. But it's very difficult to create deep scenarios in a simple, shallow game.