... "Automated Energy Hamster"? Really? *dies laughing*
Chris and I had a fair bit of discussion of alternate ways of handling energy to get around the it's-basically-trivial-decisions-in-the-common-case thing, and basically every idea I had was something he'd already tried a loooong time ago and found was worse than what we have now. As he said, once you get to an implementation where you've tried a bunch of other things and it's _still_ the least of all available evils, you've probably found a good place to settle for a while.
After I implemented that chat log thing with these keybinds I told Chris that you really know you've settled in when the game starts to make fun of its own implementation (and, to some degree, the players who it bothers)
That said, still thinking of things for the next big dev cycle and so on.
Also, if the chat message joke gets on your nerves (it can be spammy) you can change it to a blank (the empty string) in the main.xml language file and the game will just not create the chat log message.