Yeah this was a bit weird, it kinda makes sense when you compartmentalize the features in the sequence; the laborers, the raw resources and the means of production, a production chain.  The intention seems to be to abstract the raws and allow you to adapt your planet to your needs, BUT at this point it's just implemented incomplete/oddly, the controls for controlling the resource abstraction are very incomplete, there's no way to direct a planet to a specific planet or manage supply lines of particular resources and i think that's what this concept is tentatively approaching, it's just that at this stage it's the simplest implementation - just proximate resource, which to me defeats the purpose of the implementation, but might just be temp. I'm hoping the abstraction is the goal and it's just in the forming phase.  I wish there were some "goal" draft docs around we could check out though.

Planet tiles value vary based on the resources of the planet. A +3 Wealth tile on a planet with 6 Wealth, surrounding by wealth boosting tiles is a dream. A +3 Wealth tile on a planet with 1 Wealth is medicore at best (in fact Im probably going to use it for something else).

The interaction between planet tiles and resources is intentional. Though we can do some work to help correlate them (just because its fun when that correlation happens). For example Mountainous and Jungle worlds which tend to be high Weath should also be more likely to have Mountainous tiles (which provide wealth bonuses). etc.

We will definitely balance along those lines.

But. It doesn't mean that 0 tech planets (for example) wont have research boosting tiles. Part of this is just the curse of random, to have good, you must have bad. But there is another reason as well. The tech a planet has isn't just the base planet, from from all the colonies that feed into it. A planet could have 0 tech but with a couple high tech colonies that +3 Research tile could become very valuable.