This was a topic in today's dev stream. Some devs want to remove the per-planet production wheel, others want to make improvements. I think we can all agree that in the current game you must manage the production wheel on a per-planet basis to get the maximum production and benefit from specializing. I think everyone can also agree that micromanaging the per-planet wheel gets unwieldy after a dozen or so planets, and ridiculously time consuming, repetitive, and annoying as you get into the mid and late game. As a person who likes to specialize, I would not like to see this feature go away. I won't throw a fit if it does, but I will be a little bummed out because I consider it a great new feature for this third installment in the series. But I also don't want it to stay in its micromanagement-intensive state.
If you're going to take it away, be sure to have some way to convert between production types on a per-planet basis. This probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway for the benefit of those just walking into this discussion with no prior experience in the series. In GalCiv2 you could select a focus (social, military, or research) which did conversions with a penalty. In GalCiv3 we have projects that convert from social manufacturing to research or wealth. It's a similar function, but not quite the same. There is no military project that allows you to tell a planet to put more of its manufacturing into ships, just the slider. And there is no way to convert research or wealth into increased manufacturing (to be fair, I'm not sure this happend in GalCiv2 either). If you do go the projects route, please be sure to revisit how they work. A percentage increase based upon the amount of social manufacturing you have may not be the right answer. In GalCiv2 it was a flat percentage of manufacturing points that got converted, similar to how it worked in earlier betas.
If you do keep per-planet production settings, some in the community have already come up with some ideas that may guide you. My own ideas are here and here. Osbot essentially suggested the same concept here. Xsifilid introduced the terrific idea of "triggers" here. Our ideas basically allow the user to create production wheel templates or profiles to which he can set multiple similarly specialized planets. With some governors and/or triggers to manage automatic profile switching, it could be a very powerful tool for specializing planet production, reducing micromanagement, still requires users to make the planet management decisions, and it could also make the AI more clever with its production management.
I wish the best of luck to the devs. This is not going to be an easy battle to win, but something needs to change one way or the other.