Fortunately Factorio is the kind of game where nobody has the right to tell you how you're supposed to play. I'm sure if this change makes it to 2.0 (heck maybe

Fortunately Factorio is the kind of game where nobody has the right to tell you how you're supposed to play. I'm sure if this change makes it to 2.0 (heck maybe even during an open beta, which I'm sure will drop at some point), there will be a mod that reshuffles the tech tree. You can also always tweak the mapgen parameters for Nauvis to produce less cliffs, or use a console command. Some of these will disable achievements, but anyway, the true achievement in this game is simply the number of hours you sunk in ;)