ABSOLUTELY!!! it's totally worth it!!! Awesome Idea!!!!

This is an awesome game so far. It's very fun to play and reminds me of Autonauts without feeling like the sole purpose is automation. I love a game where you can do it all yourself if you prefer, but automation helps a ton. Another nice thing is that the further you go from the base, the more risky life gets for you.

I love the idea of having humans do work in the base. Currently I build a huge group of humans and then mow down the wasteland, but in the base they just stand around or get in the way, so having them work is a great idea.

I would have robots be faster and have a boost to efficiency. For example, if 1 harvest is 1-2 corn for a human, it would be 1-4 for a robot, incentivising you to move up the tech tree to robotomation, which would free up those humans to do another task.

I get more irritated than I should at how hard it is to come up with metals, so building a mine and sending humans in could be cool, and possibly have side-effects such as more thirst, or even having beasts come from the mine and attack the base. I don't think robots should mine (perhaps they should), however, having a refinery where the ores are processed into metals could be automated with an efficiency boost by bots.

Since you're legitimately interested in listening to people, I thought I'd share my two cents. Love your work, man! 

PS: When I play games, I don't like to waste time. Sometimes my time is very precious. You have addressed that with the faster version of the game, but have you thought about teleportation? One of the first mods I look for is a teleportation mod so I can play faster and do cool things. I don't mean teleportation between cities. I am referring to a maneuverability mod where you can blink across the screen (for example, if you just want to exit the map). I'd love it if that were to appear in the game :-p.

As we discussed, I certainly am for 'domestic' villagers, ones that actually do your work, but may be also guards or whatnto depending on what jobs you give them. In general, I think that automation would need to be harder, however, given its benefits - something locked behind certain quests and technological advancements you mused about in the past.

I also will underline I'd like getting the villagers in the first place slightly harder as they're now showing up all the time as long there's beds. Actual conscious effort in recruitment, perhaps?

All for them dying if you won't be able to provide basic food/water to your villagers, but again, they have to be somewhat harder to acquire if that is to impact the player. What's a few deaths if people to replace them keep coming in all the time, guaranteed?

Certainly I like the idea of unique or merely rare quest/secret NPCs. I am not sure there has to be a lot work to flesh them out with unique traits, though. Slightly different stats, robot NPCs possibly using up some electricity for an hour a day instead of sleeping/eating/drinking but also requiring 'wrenching' to heal would be fine. For me, most of their value would be in that they stand out and are unique, not in any particular mechanics gimmick but I may be in minority on this one.

Certainly, as written in my wall of text in suggestions, I wouldn't mind some NPC/player customization - both in terms of looks and names!