I don’t know much about this topic, but it’s great that you documented it to this level on the development forums. I will second what @Thim was saying: it is good to be foreword thinking, but don’t try to worry yourself sick about the later stages in Thrive, which we realistically wouldn’t even begin conceptualizing in considerable detail for at least a decade. Though I see that you emphasized the iterative approach we can take to such a system in the OP.
I’ll also document a few other topics which are possibly relevant. Apologies if you already read through this material yourself; it would nonetheless make information more accessible in the distant future!
The whole thread has a lot of content, but this post from @Nunz in particular is pretty relevant to our approach currently:
@Buckly wrote up on how we were planning to deal with patch designation in the multicellular and aware stages as well, which references Nunz’s post above: