> I watched part of the speed run on marathon + death world challenge and the guy got robotics under 2 hours. So it’s nit that late game.

You were watching a speed runner who knew exactly what they were doing. I was a first time player who didn't. I spent north of 30 hours tediously laying out factory bits and wondering "why the hell can't I automate this?"

P.S.: and hey wait, whole speed runs of Factorio seem to be in the range of 2-3 hours, and you're suggesting under 2 hours isn't late game?

In a speed run, investing in robots is a waste of time and oil (oil being the most precious resource because you have so little of it in your starting area). However, robotics is necessary for yellow science, which is likely to be the last science pack (purple science unlocks automation techs, which might be useful for speed). So leaving robotics until one of the last techs to be researched wouldn't be unreasonable in a speed run.

But robotics itself only requires blue research. In my own speed run of ~6h40m (admittedly, on an older version of the game, but the game pre-blue science hasn't changed much), I got blue science in about 2h, and bee-lining for robotics after that would only take a couple of researches beyond that (advanced oil, electric engine, robotics, and then construction robotics to do anything useful IIRC).

I wouldn't call anything that takes only blue science to get to be late game; for me, that requires at least purple or yellow science. Robotics is on the other side of the oil barrier, which is definitely going to push it far later in the game for new people, but it's also accessible before you hit the point of needing to repetitively scale up your factory (which tends to come with purple/yellow science), so it is accessible before you really need it. However, the game doesn't particularly guide you towards knowing that it exists, so I can see how it might be frustrating for new players.

"marathon + death" is much harder than normal Factorio. I agree that it's a bit of a weird data point to bring up ("in a harder game mode it took a significant amount of time") without further reference (such as how long the full run took) though.