Hey, thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, there are a couple of stinkers here and there and sometimes indeed the production buildings are not necessarily an upgrade. It is still usually worth putting people in all of them, just due to the upkeep scaling, so diversified production is usually more sustainable.
Regarding the military, indeed the intention was to constantly upkeep the army and at least that's how I went through the whole game. When people started playing, a lot of them opted out for the going-into-red-to-overtrain the army, and that's when this issue became more prevalent. Originally if you stopped training unit strength would start slowly degrading back to 0, so first approach was heavily insentivised, but due to majority vote I removed this mechanic. I still don't want to auto-pause because it will too heavily skew the balance in favour of second approach, right now it compensates a bit by you having to micromanage your way through it