I guess I'm in the minority but I like having a reason to click on my planets each turn. I don't want everything controlled via universal commands. The planets feel more important to me that way. I'm just afraid you want the game streamlined for rediculously large maps to the point where the game can be played from a spread sheet. Don't lose the immersion just for efficiency.
No-one's suggesting that we remove the present ways to interact. The best solution would be to have both - individual micro-management is fine when you have 10 planets but painful when you have 50. And focuses practically beg to be set-able from lists; just enabling us to do that could cut down on tedious clicks per planet enormously.
As to reasons to visit planets - it'd be nice to have the old 'planet blurb' from GC2 back - the one where it gave you a quote from the guy on the street and explained life on the planet based on the prevalence of buildings. Planets really lack character atm, which makes managing them kind of dull.
Some kind of planetary events would be cool too - like galactic events, but without the big popup (show 'em in the game log, display them on the planet screen and have icons for the list screen) and just applying a random bonus or penalty for 5-10 turns. This may also encourage generalization a bit more - a generalist planet can benefit a lot more from a random event giving +50% research for 10 turns than a fully specialized industry world would. They can be totally random at first, but adding different triggers later would allow even more character - so planets with level 2+ medical buildings don't get plagues, planets with Economic Capitals are more likely to undergo a stock market boom (or crash) etc.
Stick in a little 'history' log on the planet, and each one will start to develop a whole character of it's own (I'm sure we had something like this in GC2, but I may be thinking of a different game). So we'd see the date it was founded; the date it built it's first building; the date a governor (with a randomly-generate name) was appointed; the date it had an economic boom event, the date it had a plague, the date that it was hit by a stray comet and the planet class dropped 3 levels etc.
With a few of these, I'd visit planets just to read their story from time to time, and actually managing them would be interesting just to see how their story evolved.
