I agree I'm not excited about building the settlement and that it takes forever to construct anything and whatever you do build only lasts 11 days. It takes much personal time to figure out what is the best thing to build next and how to get your city euphoria up. The lack of instructions and guidance has steered many in our guild to try and build troops straight off without consideration of euphoria. As a result their cities have low euphoria and constrained productions from 20-40% euphoria multipliers. I agree manually fighting is super boring particularly with the current AI battle command that targets a single troop to kill. This AI change has ruined all battles in FOE for me. None of them are fun. I used to take great pride in being able to finish a battle with no troop loss by hiding, using terrain features and proper troop selection. As it now, it hardly makes any difference. On live, attackers ignore rogues standing right in front of them and run around to the back of the field to kill my real troop trying to hide. Here with no rogues, the fast troops still swarm a single troop trying to make sure you lose at least one so you can spend $$ to revive it because you CAN'T build another one. You only get to build 2 military barracks. It is a rigged game to make you spend money.
The whole QI takes way too much time, manual battles are slow and the time it takes to organize/build the QI city is just too much on top of GE, GBG, EVENTS, aid your friends, contribute to GB, read guild messages, socialize (not much), pvp, settlements, daily quests, city collection and main city construction. At least with my main city the time I spend to arrange and construct it stays for months or years. We don't know what Season 2 will look like but if I have to start over with the same blank city I will scream. It would be better if we kept our city for the whole championship, then it would show much more of a difference between people who spent the effort to make an efficient city versus those who just went for the quick kill.
Bottomline, I spend my time where I get the greatest return for the time invested. There is not enough for everything so I have to choose. I currently don't do pvp because the prizes are a joke. I play and spend money on events because the prizes are generally really good. I do gbg because of the fp it generates. So far the amount of time required for QI versus what I've won is a miserable return. I've already decided I'm not going to waste time fighting and will build my city to make resources for contributions as that seems like less time for the same returns. If after the first season I don't get some amazing and incredible prizes (it doesn't appear like I will get much of anything) I invest anymore time on QI.