Is it me, or does the emperor have no clothes?

Cell stage:
- Very fun, very cute, VERY SHORT. Blew through it in a few minutes. It's a minigame or a casual game.

Creature stage:
- Best part of the game. Carefully iterating your creature's anatomy to give it the desired abilities is great fun.

So far, so good! Looking promising!

Tribal stage:
*sigh*. It's a garden-variety RTS. Not even a particularly good one. I'm repeatedly beset by enemies that I haven't got enough resources to fight off. After about a dozen deaths and restarts, I finally get lucky and fend off the attacks enough to advance to the next stage...

Civilization stage:
... ANOTHER garden-variety RTS. Again, not even a particularly good one. *SIGH*.

Space stage:
What the heck is this? It's an exact copy of Star Control 2. Except, the conversations you have with other civilizations aren't funny this time around. And the interesting multi-ship space combat sequences are gone. And every task is an annoying fetch quest!! Except now, for some reason, the go-back-to-deliver-the-goods portion of the fetch quest has a time deadline, so most of the times I try them, I fail because I didn't rush back quickly enough.

Does the space stage of this game get any better than fetch quests, or should I just go back and play through the creature stage a few times?