I wanted to like this one more than I actually did. I am unsure if any criticism I give is wanted or will even be read, but I'll go over what I generally didn't like and the few points of interest that I did.
Automation costs are always a big sticking point for me because of how difficult they seem to be to balance, and they always seem to be far too costly to justify using if they do have a cost. That being said, the costs of automation were balanced reasonably well with early and midgame tasks! Finding a strong alpha coin banker was actually very satisfying and getting the steady flow of alpha coins going was probably the most fun part of the game. Right after that, though, pie merchants became extremely costly to hire and took massive cuts of pie sales, while pie manufacturing automation was obscenely wasteful compared to manual processing and really didn't help at all with offloading the task anyway because of the bellows. I simply wrote off the loss of buying the automation tools for those and I would tell people to simply avoid even interacting with that system at all (especially since it's probably easier to just beeline the ending once you have beta coin flow). There are a lot of mechanics that feel punitive for the sake of being punitive like that, like I don't actually understand why golden limes decay other than to make them harder to use once you unlock their utility. I would get bottlenecked on juice sales, so I need to wait for a golden lime to show up in my baskets, go to my inventory to use it, and because golden lime decay is on a global timer, it would disappear before I could consume it. Very unnecessarily annoying for no clear value in the gameplay.
Prestiging (in this game called "traveling to a new town" strips you pretty damn bare. Speaking of unnecessarily annoying, it's diegetically weird to lose your developed skills upon simply traveling (nothing supernatural is implied there), nor does building them back up add much gameplay wise beyond being a time sink. Coins and equipment and such are fine, I can see why you wouldn't be able to take 15000 peelers with you, though a liquidation mechanic that kickstarted you a little bit coin-wise in the next town would have been appreciated. I actually liked how the game gave you a very defined limit on its "prestige points" (mega coins) via bank account size to avoid the confusion of figuring out an optimal prestige time.
Oh right, respect. I nearly quit at this section when I saw the jump from 1k to 10k respect to unlock progress. This is just bad, I'm sorry to be excessively blunt about it. Without an exploit I discovered accidentally to trick the game into giving you excessive respect for lakes, I probably would have seen the hour of clicking in a square pattern ahead of me and gave up. Trying to use a reasonable amount of lakes (3-5) created impossible layouts so frequently that even trying to do it that way caused a respect net negative through what felt like no fault of my own, and using fewer lakes did not add enough respect to make up for the slowdown of not being able to simply click in a square pattern anymore. I am aware research is meant to help with that but it also magnifies the respect penalty for quitting a layout, leading to just backpedaling faster if you get unlucky in a streak. It is genuinely infuriating and it put a terrible taste in my mouth for mechanics that were not quite as bad but still unhelpful later in the game (like the aforementioned bucket nozzles and pie merchants). I suspect you are not interested in any further development, but if you do, I would consider putting this entire section in the trash and making something else from the ground up. It was pure vexation.
Overall? I think you did something good here overall and if you learned something about game design while doing it, that's excellent. But I wouldn't recommend this to people to actually play as a fun game in and of itself. It puts a few too many sandbags on progression for little reason, and some segments are simply poor to the point of degrading the experience. But this IS competent, and I would expect someone who made a game of this quality to take the lessons they learned and make something way better that I'd be excited to play. Good job!