Thanks for the feedback! Glad you liked the tutorial, I wanted to do one like that for so long and was glad I found the motivation to do it this time around.
I did experiment with a few different ways of displaying the patterns, including showing the grid on the planet's surface, having a two-step selection with an preview overlaid on your canvas, and even screen-space textures so that everything always faced the same way, and I ended up making some compromises to fit the vision I had for the overall look of the planet. They may not be the right ones from a gameplay point-of-view though...