With upcoming industry limit to prevent single self-sufficient colony, I considered trying to avoid active Pather cells since they are so annoying and the most dangerous threat in endgame. Only the Intel exploit makes them tolerable (and only if I can disrupt all of them for a year after destroying only a single pather base), and that will be gone soon.
If Industrial Planning does not reduce demand anymore, then that means the only way to meet fuel demand for a big colony (with megaport, waystation, and/or military base) is to use a synchrotron (or alpha core), which means that colony with fuel production and synchrotron will be targeted by pathers, because synchrotron increases pather interest. It will be impossible to have faction-wide self-sufficiency without starting more fires that need to be put out. (There are already too many fires that require direct player intervention to stop.)
According to the wikia, fuel production with synchrotron has 4 interest, instead of 2 on fuel production without it. I noticed player gets sleeper cell at 3 that does nothing harmful (presumably as a warning), and active cells at 4+ which becomes a recurring pain to deal with short of removing industries. Curiously, heavy industry stays at 2 regardless of upgrades or nanoforge. I like that heavy industry does not exceed 2 because no heavy industry on any colony is very painful, given the junk player gets without one. (I would not want to see heavy industry spike to 4 just because player upgraded to orbital works or installs nanoforge.)
It would be nice that synchrotron did not spike pather interest. If not, at least something (either new item or old Industrial Planning 1 restored) that can either boost fuel production or reduce demand that does not cause more problems (either pather cells or hegemony inspections).