What work? Its a Persistent check, the layers are fine and just checking that you understand how to micromanage your resources And what the hell are you on about it not being at the level of work? You take 3-5 loops of easy work(steal all the power cells you don’t need to reach Laurion, power on Laurion, set up the Generator, stockpile the last resources and dive in, you don’t even need the Food Synth Coupler you know you’ll die in there)
Anything requiring persistence is work and you even call it work later on, so you contradict yourself.
3-5 loops is 15-20 minutes a loop, is roughly 1.5 hours of gametime. That is a lot of time to complete a single task.
Anything requiring more than 30 minutes of gametime isn't fun, its work. And I'm not being paid to play this game, so that is time I could be doing something else.