And drop the creature, tribe and civilization stages.

The cell stage and the space stage are really the only fun stages. The cell stage ends to soon and dumps us into the unplayable abomination that is the creature stage.

Seriously, I don't "get" the middle 3 stages: The cell stage and the space stage both encourage exploration. Unfortunately the cell stage doesn't really have a lot to find. Other than behemoth sized critters that are invariably faster than whatever I've made

The creature stage is not fun to explore. All there are are nests of creatures that are either easy to socialize/defeat, or too hard. with very little middle ground. In the cell stage you don't feel the need to 'metagame' by always using the best parts. In the creature stage you no longer get to choose which mouth part or arm or whatever. Unless you've found a few variants you *need* to choose whichever one(s) have the highest level bite or sing or whatever hostile/social stats the bits have. Even worse, the DNA budget is so tight you cannot put on anything just to look nice. I guess thats evolution for you. But I never did seea a tortise with only one scale (giving +3 health) on its back before.

I really love the cell stage as well. Adding the advanced editors to gameplay could really stretch it out without adding anything else.

I'd love even more to see the 3 other stages being improved, especially the creature stage, which has the biggest potential of them all yet fails the most. Heck, I could even buy Spore for its Creature stage if it were decent!

Cell stage is overrated.

Cell stage is the best in the game, regardless of shallow gameplay and "cute" cells. The fact that it's the best stage shows how much Spore sucks.