
This might be cheating but I’m assuming mods/DLCs to a game count as part of the game.

It’s more akin to trying to drive a semi truck with a semi truck motor but then something drops and there’s a ton of friction like an unintentional tractor pull. Even the best chips on the market display subpar performance.
Not really. The one exception I made in recent times was Cities Skylines 2 after I had 400+ hours in the original, and that was only due to a 30% off sale days before release. Though I wouldn’t recommend it for most, I still have 42 good hours in it so it was worth my money.
Otherwise I’m a very patient gamer.

I’m gonna have to agree. It used to be about the most slow and bloated thing in existence, but they actually fixed a lot of performance issues last time I checked. It’s still slow, but in the same time period Steam on Windows decided to add a pointless splash screen increasing the load time by 4x, letting Epic take the W by a wide margin in load times, while responsiveness is a draw.
Yes, I know that Steam is more feature complete and consumer friendly which is why I still prefer to buy from Steam when possible.
The interesting thing is that although I’ve almost never spent money on a gacha system and haven’t played much gacha systems recently, my brain subconsciously craved for more but in a safer way.
That’s why I created the JavaScript weighted playlist for myself: A random selection of songs from my music library where some songs play (much) more than others. Getting a super rare song is akin to getting a top tier drop. Additionally, the playback rate is randomized to a normal distribution, giving the tiny chance that a rare song can play with a wild playback rate. And if that wasn’t enough, some Geometry Dash related songs can randomly skip to the next song, simulating watching someone try to beat some demon level.
I’ve created a skinner box for my brain that sometimes causes me to waste hours just clicking on the “next song” button to see what shows up next. My wallet was not harmed in the process (although it might soon be because I want it to work on a portable device, but that money would go to some niche open source hardware thing rather than a greedy gacha publisher).

I spent way too much time with Bob’s+Angel’s with SpaceX, 160h in and I just unlocked the final tier of modules and now I need to scale up the whole base to get enough science to make the millions of science I need to research everything.
I haven’t even started Space Exploration (which is very different than SpaceX = Space Extension), but I won’t have enough time to play that before the Factorio DLC comes out…
I don’t want to toot my own horn too much here, but I’m developing a card game that is much more roguelite than rougelike, with strong meta-progression. It’s all free and open source and playable at superspruce.org.
If you like strong meta-progression, you might also like incremental games, such as Cookie Clicker, Antimatter Dimensions, and Realm Grinder. These games are satisfying due to the pure progression you experience within them.
Here’s an idea that won’t cost anything: Browser games! There are tons of great Incremental games playable for free on a browser, and plenty of other games too.