The theme definitely comes a little bit late yes. I originally intended it to be much earlier but I got too carried away with the duality between stress and "other things" that I didn't really come back to the concept until there was little time left. There was an additional duality I wanted to visit about choosing to fight for equality between lunes and sols people, or *not doing that*. This is implemented extremely roughly at the end of the game
The settlements are frustrating indeed--they came on the last day of development and I didn't really bother balancing them. It's probably quicker to get the e7 lunarity without them and instead just getting as many quick resets as possible (There should be a label that says "the game isn't balanced beyond this point" when they appear but perhaps it's not implemented correctly.)