Spore - Who is getting it?

[TinCow]

My wife got it a while ago and I picked it up and started playing recently. It is entertaining in its own way, but bizarrely my main complaint is that it doesn't seem to have much replayability. The gameplay at each level is very much cut down and, while enjoyable in its own way, doesn't seem to hold much prospect of being different on a subsequent playthrough. I think the main problem is simply that despite all the 'customization' of every aspect of the game, nothing changes. About the only place it makes a difference is in the cell and creature phases, but those are too short and shallow to sustain the game by themselves. Beyond the creature phase, the actual makeup of your creature doesn't have any impact on the game at all. The tribe phase simply decorates your creature with some clothing, and the civ phase just generates some buildings and vehicles whose appearance has zero impact on anything. Once you get to the space phase, none of your customizations have any meaning to the game whatsoever. Terraforming a planet is a repetitive chore which quickly becomes mind-numbingly dull when you start to engage in it on a large scale. Warfare is just a grind of clicking rather than any real strategy, trading is just slow and boring without much skill or tactics, and diplomacy is absurd because the other AI civilizations don't do anything unless you are at war with them.

The whole Sim series has always been known for its essentially unlimited replayability. I don't quite understand how this has happened, but somehow Spore seems to have lost this entirely. It seems like a glorified character creation simulator with only a tiny veneer of gameplay placed on top of it. How could this game have spent this long in development and ended up in this state?