I always thought that game must have an incredible ontology underneath it that would be amazingly useful to other ventures...

I also recall playing it and, at a certain point, realizing that I was stubbornly uncreative in using the variety of options available to me.

In retrospect maybe that wasn’t true, and the game managed the massive potential for variance by condensing things into smaller buckets. Either way those were some brave developers agreeing to that project scope.