I actually don't spam solar... I
liked to have a small group of advanced solars as baseline energy, with burst generation (and matter fabrication power) provided by other sources (personally, I liked to go primarily for methane in gas turbines in midgame: about the same net power gain per mB as geothermals, but more interesting to get fuel for). And I actually prefer that uum be expensive. Given how powerful it is, I feel that it's reasonable that it should be hard to get and sparingly used. But this change has made it so that I can't have both uum that's as hard to get as it is powerful, and solars that are easy enough to get that they're worth having at all. Which is to say that the new recipes have caused a gross imbalance that simply wasn't there before (although the hybrid and ultimate hybrid recipes were always pretty terrible). I suppose I could make it balanced again by increasing the energy output by a factor of 8 (so that advanced solars are effectively the new hybrid solars), and just building 1/8 the number, but by the time it's reasonable to build advanced solars with the new recipe there still wouldn't be any point to doing that instead of just going for the really high end stuff - I'll already have enough power generation to hold me over until I can get an automated fusion reactor going, which making advanced solars would just delay needlessly.
And yes, since advanced solars have effectively obsoleted themselves with this update, I would be better off with the better balanced (although somewhat less interesting) compact solars. That doesn't make it less disappointing that the cost/benefit analysis for advanced solars, which I had previously liked, is now large cost/no benefit.
Also:
1 ASP with free iridium takes 5 RL days to pay itself, and then the second one takes half of it since you already the first one free for you, the third is one third of the first and so on
This is just incorrect. On your 24/7 server (I don't play on one, so it's not applicable to me), the second one takes the same amount of time as the first to pay for itself, and so does the third, and so on. The ones that have already paid for themselves are producing energy, yes, but that is unrelated to the time it takes for a newly built panel to generate the same amount of energy that it took to make. 2.5 days after making the second panel, you still have less energy (more likely, less uum) than if you hadn't built it, as it will still have another 2.5 days to go before it pays for that 2 uum it cost.
Edit- as to the bees, lucky you. The best I've ever managed to get is free bauxite dust (which is admittedly still pretty decent).