Is a narrow 3D map the best UI for this game?

First of all let me say that I like the game a lot and I care about it. Kudos to Soren and all the team!

I understand that having little animated models in a 3D map is cool and help with sales, but I have my doubts about being the best UI for this particular game.

The concerns I have are: 

• You can't see all the terrain on the screen at once. This makes it difficult to have a general view of what's happening. You have to compile information from many sources. You get better of course, as you start seeing how something affects you in the variations of the yield of each resources, but still... 
• The focus of the player is, most of the time, on the prices, event log, stocks and cash accumulation in the late game (which is hidden in a tooltip btw!), not on the map. And yet the map takes a lot of space and has detailed animations. 
• The use of color and highlighting of the buildings is not colorblind friendly. This makes finding your own buildings hard, more so when you can place buildings anywhere on the map so you can't infer ownership by territory. I'm not even sure this can be fixed given the complexity of the representation. (About 8% of men are color blind).

Of course I have THE BEST SOLUTION EVER, but let's leave that to Soren and his team