The central decision of the game is when to play your houses. And you didn't even really talk about that.

Few real decisions to make....Not in my experience, either in tile placement or in disk placement. Of possible interest is the thread:Informal experiment: how easy to find "the optimal disk placement" in various positions?wherein we see that even in the second phase, which people often complain is "automatic" or "obvious", the decisions are not necessarily obvious.