I have expressed my opinions in a prior thread here: Restart the Game Scene Every Spawn
So I won’t go into reasonings too specifically again- you and others have covered it pretty well. But it is good to document disagreements and contrasting views on these forums.
I do agree with your point about it being all-or-nothing: if we reset the world on grounds that a bunch of time passes between different lives, then it would be a bit hypocritical to keep compounds. Carrying over the compounds from a prior life also breaks the “generation as a blank testing slate”.
One thing that I will say that beyond the logical implications: each exit from the editor is meant to be an experiment of how your idea works in a new world. Resetting the world means that your build is being truly tested against the current environment, independent from the situation of your prior build. But if you carry over compounds directly from generations, how are you truly testing the current merit of your organism?
I was previously wondering about some sort of spawning compound option which gives the player the same amount of time to get the ball rolling. So no matter what compounds the player has, they are given enough free compounds for, I don’t know, 30 seconds of free acclimation to the new world (or max storage capacity if that’s more than current storage). But I’m not sure if that would be possible.
If it’s a bunch of work to make something else work, I think topping up to initial works for the world reset option as a band-aid.