I also agree, their fine the way they are. The only problem I see, is that it maybe feels like for many players, that they don't want to test those buildings, but I've used them successfully and relevantly quite often. Especially engineering lab, I know some players who use patent lab very good.

A minor update, Patent lab has become relatively hot lately, especially in the meta I play in. The reason being that nanotech being the best ****ing patent in our games, since all the prices are being messed around with hacker array and market shinanigans, there are now quite many people going for a fast level 2 patent lab. Teleportation, while still being very good, is just too expensive, and in the good/price ratio falls just so behind. Other hot items are smart machines and carbon scrubbing , also+100% energy adjacency is some situations, but mostly early game. Teleportation is still grabbed as a luxury patent at some point, but usually you just want to play smart with placing your claims and buildings.

One combo I've also seen is +100% efficiency of pleasure domes along with -50% power consumption.

Engineering lab is however quite less used, and very often when I even produce it, it just doesn't feel impactful enough as upgrading anything to high levels takes so long that by then the situation has changed completely, and upgrading only one levell makes you wonder why you just don't use it for another building(getting nanotech beats engineering lab quite a lot) The only reasons I've seen is upgrading water in a water light map, and upgrading oxygen since it is really hard to produce.

I know I said before that I had used engineering lab successfully, but the meta just changes, and in the current games I play all markets are being consumed so fast for the engineering lab to be of much use. However it is still useful if you are able to predict shifts or are controlling them yourself, also an upgraded 3 cluster attracts much less aggro than a none upgraded 4 cluster.

And one of the key aspects is, that if you got away with patent lab or engineering lab and moved them to HQ, then you couldn't sabotage them, which I think can be a bad idea... it basically makes expansive the best researcher as they upgrade their HQ the fastest so they could easily grab the best patents without a way for others to stop them.

Engineering lab for me takes too long and too little. The exponential cost of chemicals is too great for me to want to divert my economy from life support and other consumables which are always necessary, always increase in price and are easy to manipulate to astronomical prices with hacker arrays, black market sabotage and buying out of companies that are producing consumables. The amount of profit you can make from a market is limited by how much is consumed and not just by how much is produced, which makes engineering labs not that great because they do not increase demand.

The only patent I almost always get is Nanotech because switching out your buildings (farms in particular, which need glass which is expensive) for free is priceless. Additionally you can use it sell off offworlds from companies you buy out. (The reason that I'm not saying that I sell my own offworlds is because I hardly ever build them any more, because they are a "kick me" structure that attracts sabotage like nuts and because the value of their ingredients is often in the order of 50k to 150k.) With nanotech you can often get a 100k to 400k boost in funds depending on how many expensive HQ addons, farms and offworlds you can sell off to buy out the last player.

Never bother with the lab.  Often by the time you've invested (heavily) in a thing it's no longer a thing by the time your investment should've started paying off, and you sometimes don't even get back the value of the chems you sank into it.  Nah.  Eng lab offers far too little, far too slowly when considered alongside the other special buildings. 

Eng lab can work for you in the long term but with things like the double Hacker-Jacker trick effectively winning you the game before you've even hit HQ lvl 5, most games are done long before the Eng Lab's benefits have a chance of taking hold.

I regularly use the engineering lab. I typically go with the patent lab, and then once I get the few patents that I want, I scrap and switch to the engineering lab and do double upgrades on thing I want to produce a lot of. It doesnt take long to payback the investment when resource prices are high. Even if you spend 20k on upgrades for something, thats only 100 extra units at $200 to pay, which doesn't take long if you are running 3+ buildings. The scaling can become very nice! It's worth it IMO since you can produce resources faster which means you sell more before other players help drive the price down. Also, the upgrades are permanent. I use upgrades since sometimes I'd rather just maximize output than worry about messing with the markets and risking buying/selling large quantities of resources to profit. 

The patent lab gets an awful lot of use, to the point where its actually annoying since its not uncommon for 3-4 people in an 8 person game to throw up a patent lab at level 2-3.

There is most certainly risk. I've lost 100k buying into coming shortages when someone happened dumped their entire stock of resources during a Laggy moment since theirs sales apparently processed first once the game caught up.

Its not hard to do properly but the process isn't infallible.

What he said.

It won't be long before everyone uses this Hacker-Jacker trick, if they're not already.  Aside from the obvious tell that there's two Hacker Arrays, by the time you start the process it's already too late for anyone else to do anything about it.  Almost no risk at all.  No amount of Eng Labs will rake in the kind of near-instant profit that Hacker-Jacking will.