Just woken up so not reading the whole thread (I know, I'm awful), but:

Ultimately, you're paying fees in your starbase because that's the balance tradeoff for unlimited slots for everyone. If we take slots away we need some form of substitute (pseudo-)scarcity so that everyone in the universe doesn't just build in Jita 4-4, which would be bad for various reasons but primarily because it removes a whole lot of interesting decisions and makes the rest of the map an industrial wasteland, which is not a thing we want. We felt that scaling fees were a good solution to this, as fees were already a thing (even though they were essentially irrelevant) and because ISK is kinda the nexus of decision-making for serious industrialists. If we're going to use fees, we pretty much have to apply them everywhere, including starbases because they scale too well otherwise and we don't want to re-add pseudo-slots to stop them from being too powerful.

The lore reason is just something to the effect that (Abraxas has the real version, if I was in the office I could look it up but I'm not) CONCORD has stopped paying worker costs for capsuleer industrialists, so now you have to pay them instead. We deliberately talk in terms of workforce fees to try and reduce the cognitive dissonance of "why do I have to pay in my starbase" and "why is it the same all over the system", but obviously it's am imperfect fix.

We totally understand why people are having this reaction, though - it's your tower, why are you having to pay extra? - and it's probably an area of the design that could be adjusted to give a better result, but not obviously without trading off against reduced ease-of-use. We could, f.ex, require "workers" to be put into labs and assembly arrays as fuel, which are purchased for ISK, so you're not paying money on the job but you are paying the equivalent amount on the back end... but then you have more fuel to haul around and people generally hate doing that. Swings and roundabouts.


Oh, and as to the "this extra cost hurts me", that should cancel out economically, because everyone's paying the same extra cost in a given location so prices ought to rise accordingly.


Anyway, like I said, just got up, trying to help, may be some crazy in the above I'm not spotting currently, sorry :)