You have to hide it a lot better now which on the alpha island is very very hard to do but not impossible.. I stood with a light robot in the middle of a perfect planting location and didn't see a soul for a good 6 hours to 8 hours.

But you're correct in saying that the average yield is now greatly reduced. On beta when they would grow to 50 units at a time I was about to get around 12k Noralgis per 50 cycles. One plant was enough to produce T4 fittings for one heavy mech or at least a mech. The way I see it the devs are trying to make T4 rare as it looks like there won't be much improvement on T4 gear. They should probably have looked at cutting the supply rather than the research and it looks like that's what they've final done.

The idea is to make it hard to produce or at least more time consuming. When the Norgalis plants were growing incorrectly (Growing far too fast) I was able to plant 3 small fields and harvest them every 8 hours for a week. This alone gave me, just for myself, enough Noraglis to produce T4 gear for the coming months if not more. If I was producing for a large corporation it would last a lot less but I'd also be able to gather a purchase a lot more.

The new yields mean it's possible to get around 20 units every few hours per plant but the plants mature a lot faster (It seems to anyway). In the end I am getting slightly less yield (As I can't visit every few hours like clockwork) but in some cases the plants now have more cycles in. I've lost a lot of yield but I am still able to gather much more than I need.