The long-term goal is for the game to support multiple economic models. 

In the original design for GalCiv III, you would only have had the economic wheel as long as you had the default form of government. Then you would be able to go down the government tech tree towards Galactic Federation, Galactic Tyrant or Galactic Republic at which point the wheel would be replaced with a different system entirely.

When we axed those other forms of government, we realized we didn't have anything for per-planet control so we just threw in the wheel there too without thinking through what the impact would be.

We realized, soon after 1.0, that the wheel on a per planet basis didn't work out because a) it's a lot of micro management and it was ridiculously OP'd.    So even update after we planned to take it out and replace it with something else but each update we kept having to delay that.

Now, what we will be doing is that wheel lovers will in 1.41 (this week) get a prefs.ini change that will let them have their wheel back so they can exploit the game mechanics all they want.  In 1.5, the wheel (global or otherwise) will change such that the more you push the economics in a given direction, the more push-back you get from the citizenry.  The planetary wheel will become a racial trait called "Command Economy".

In the future, there will be different forms of government that will introduce players to different economic systems. Some with sliders, some with no controls at all, some with lists of subsidies, some with other types of controls each with a give or take to them.

I suggest to not make the planetary wheel a racial trait, but to push it back and reintroduce it when different forms of government are ready.

Agreed; this not only feels like a rushed decision, but also gives the impression of chaotic and arbitrary decision-making coming so soon after taking it out. If you're bringing it back with coercion, bring it back for everyone. If not, then just give us the prefs.ini file and make it clear that SD doesn't support it. Otherwise, all we're going to be hearing about in 1.5 is how the wheel is either over- or under-powered compared to focuses and so now either the Yor are gimped or else you have to play a race with Command Economy.

I don't care so much about the semantics over game mechanics as an abstract representation so long as they make a lick of sense and promote depth and fun. Yet, as you point out Naselus, this is the risk as you say and I'm curious as to whether such an approach could be balanced well. But then again, how can we quantify what we are yet to see, given that SD have only given us an outline of future plans? Things change, and in the context of game development, I understand that they can change a lot, so it does not bother me that Frogboy has taken some newer inspirations. I don't think I know of any other company that are so open about their development process, so perhaps that contributes to the sense of 'haphazardness'? 

I don't know/have any answers (and I don't expect you to either), but for me personally, I really like the 1.4 update and Gal Civ3 has only been steadily improving. I'd like to see how SD's ideas pan out, as it is pretty clear to me that they're going to some lengths to incorporate player ideas into their long-term design goals.

There are a couple of different discussions in this thread, but what I'm getting out of it is that there should be a notification on the start screen when there is a major patch with a link to the patch notes. Weather or not you like the change, it would be good for SD to do a little better job of communicating with those players to do not frequent the forums or streams.