How do people feel about Wilderness?

I tried a game recently as Wilderness and ... I personally hated it.

Ended up doing about 100 years (before constant MP desync) and I had +26 biomass per month at the most, with 7 planets all with 3 or more Cradles. I had Terrestrial Sculpting and like 6 planets in my territory that could be terraformed, but never got anywhere close to the absurd 2500 Biomass needed for one.

I was drowning in basic resources. Food, minerals, and energy I had absurd amounts of despite building as many research places as I possibly could fit. I couldn't stop hitting a cap on all those resources ... and I never needed them ever, it was always biomass I was lacking. If I was playing any other empire I would have terraformed all those planets and moved in, but saving up the 2500 biomass to terraform just one would have taken like 10 years of not building anything on any planet.

So it really wasn't that I was struggling. I was easily able to out-fleet anyone and could go hilariously far over my fleet capacity without a care in the world, because nothing about fleets takes biomass. But having to sit there not building anything for insane amounts of time is just not fun in the least, and it happened constantly as Wilderness when it's never a thing for other empires. I had considered just building tall but fewer planets is less biomass and you still need piles of it to build and upgrade every building on the planets you do have. Again it wasn't hard or challenging in the least, just boring.

So is there something I'm missing? To me it feels like they made the Origin before they even did the new pop system and then didn't want to bother updating it to match.