Forgive my forgiveness if you all won't mind, but is it just me or that the single most important thing, which is improved planetary invasion graphics has been leaved in the duskbin?

Right now, the devs are hard at work getting the game ready for Steam Workshop support, so you'll have to understand if other things get left to the side until after 1.1. Once the workshop support is done, they can get to work on another big challenge, such as the invasion screen, which is going to be a big challenge.

if i remember correctly, they had a different invasion screen in late beta when i first played the game. something with a display of the tiles on the planet and stuff like that. invasions frequently crashed the game in that beta version, so it seems like the short term solution was to use the simple results window we have now.

They are reworking it. It was confusing and a bit dull. I don't miss it and am excited to see what they come up with. It would be awesome if we had a mini-game for invasions, but I think that might be too ambitious. 

I remember being a bit disappointed with Sid Meier's initial release of Civilization V, but the DLCs have fleshed it out nicely.

My guess is that Brad planed to follow the same path with GC3.

And don't forget, GC3 is a complete re-write in 64 bit addressing mode, enabling it to expand exponentially with how much data it could handle over what GC2 could work with. GC2 (and Civ V) are about at the end of what can be done in 32 bit addressing code.