Yeah, I think something like a "show overlay/concentrate" button, which shows the remaining actions and the current status of each field might be nice. That way you can keep everything minimal 90% of the time. The issue with the way the action points were shown was that they were above the fields, so it seemed to me that they showed something field specific (like growth status). It took me a bit to realize that they were supposed to be my remaining actions. It's obvious in hindsight, but things like that were the reason I walked around a bit blindly for the first 15 minutes.
As said though, once I understood how it worked it was a lot of fun!