Pretty underwhelmed by the new AWs. Story quests are finite and there won't be any available by the time the AWs are unlocked, so much like the Vortex of Storage this is pretty useless for a late-game AW. Feels even worse when factoring in that the more recent AWs have been adjusted to be far more expensive relative to AWs obtained earlier in the game, which is probably due to Inno looking at data from push accounts and seeing that those players are running out of AWs to spend KP on, even though normal players will never reach that point (especially if new AWs continue to be more and more expensive).
Having a level 5 Magic Academy, clearing the Spire every week, and/or having Moonstone Library sets in the city makes Combining Catalysts pretty unimportant as well, and it's likely that anyone able to build this AW meets at least one of these criteria. Nevermind that while it's possible to avoid, it almost always costs some number of CCs to craft enough to open the Mystical Object in the first place and it's like...what's the point of this small 'refund'? How about RRs when opening the Mystical Object instead? CCs just aren't needed.
The most disappointing thing to me though is another chapter with no military (unit) upgrades at all. Does Inno really have no ideas for how to continue military advancement now that all units are 'maxed out' at 3 stars? Is that really the limit of their imagination?
On the whole though, this whole chapter seems to make it plain that these limited systems that the devs designed have reached their end and Inno needs to come up with something significant before the game starts to stagnate. Having a max of 3 levels for each unit looked good, until players hit that final level for each of them. Sentient goods seemed cool, until we were able to produce them in all of our factories. Now, all of these systems are 'maxed out' and new stuff needs to be introduced to keep things moving. I want to see new units and/or more upgrades for the units we have. I want to see new goods for boost+2, to make use of the factories that late-game players currently have no boost for. What I don't want to see is this stuff dragged out needlessly just to allow the devs to stall as much as possible with bringing actual interesting content to the game. The settlement stuff is always interesting to me, but if the rest of the city is going to languish with nothing besides simple building upgrades, I don't really think that's good enough. The city comes first!
EDIT: Oh, and having to choose which resource to produce in the Trader sounds more like a bottleneck than anything else. I'm pretty sure both resources are going to be extremely important in the chapter, to the point where you're definitely going to WANT to produce both at once, but since you can only produce one, you're going to be stuck waiting either way. I guess at least there're other ways to acquire seeds such that it might be possible to avoid producing them in the Trader and still make it through, but this really seems like it isn't going to be balanced in any way other than players will be stuck waiting for these resources no matter what.