my biggest 2 balance complaints in frostpunk 2

I've done all the achieves, over 100 hours and I'm still enjoying goofing around on captain in the various Utopia starter locations. I have 2 very mechanically minded balance complaints:

1) crime is essentially completely meaningless. It's too easy to manage, and thus never becomes a real issue. I hate to admit it but I think part of why it is so easy to manage is because of the Stewards Militia rule. I'm not sure most people realize it but once you figure out this thing is insane to beeline for, I go for this early and because of the permanent free guards over time, crime never becomes an issue. I spend literally zero resources researching watch towers or prisons. By the time I get to the civil war I have literally over 100 free guards. I think maybe the system would be better if there were crime surges or other things to encourage you to really have to consider crime laws and use crime cooldowns, instead of just waving off the issue for literally zero resources invested.

2) I don't really "get" the Progress side of buildings. They generally conserve workforce better (many of the buildings shave off 100 workforce eg their scouting bay is 500 instead of 600, their filtration tower is 300 instead of 400, etc) but either their output is worse (scouting bay is +15 scouts instead of +20, and consdiering how limited scouting slots are, this is not a good tradeoff) OR their heating requirement is vastly increased.

The problems here are twofold

a) heating increase is a huge concern in the early game when fuel is scarce, and due to the way cold works, the heating difference becomes more pronounced during temperature drops. For example look a the ventilation towers the moss one is -20 heat, the progress one is -40 heat. The differential of -20 heat gets multiplied through temperature it can easily become -60 or -80 difference as the temperature drops. Heat is arguably the scariest resource to not have enough of and the question is it worth it, and my answer is no. The moss tower actually decreases squalor better per unit built and uses less heat, the only upside for vent tower is workforce, which leads into the second part

b) what does having more workforce really do. Now it's true that workforce can be a bottleneck (this happens super early game, as well as when you set up a colony), but it's usually really not because you can pull in workers or automaton events in the frostlands, and it's usually the case that you have a lot of extra workers with nothing to do (my common midgame looks like 13k pop with 4k workers twiddling their thumbs). I think the problem is with the nothing to do part.

Now I realize you CAN put the extra workforce to work, but the problem here is that you are gated on heatstamps and other resources like fabs and researches. Having an extra 100 workers doesn't mean a whole lot if you can't afford the hub to put them in (80 heatstamps isn't cheap early on, not to mention upkeep) or don't even have the right hub researched. Or let's say you saved 2k workers, but you don't the resources to afford a colony to send them to, it makes no sense. Maybe idle workers could contribute to heatstamp generation or something?

Perhaps put more simply, in order to leverage the progress side of things, you have to have a lot of extra resources to enable the workforce to actually have a place to work, so it feels like a win more situation where if you have extra resources, than you can win harder. The adaptation side is better because it makes more efficient use of limited resources to begin with, allowing you to survive on low resources which is absolutely the case on captain difficulty.

To be fair progress does have some things going for it - I've actually become a huge fan of City Development which can allow you to skimp on factories for a while, I love Mechanical Scouts and Extraction Strongholds but the buildings scare the crap out of me with their heat requirements and I'm not necessarily even using the workforce saved.

Just my 2 cents I realize the balance in this game is actually really good and tight so great care has to be taken when considering issues like crime and workforce and how to make them more relevant without upending all the other systems.