I agree. Building upgrades should provide career progression by expanding the capabilities of your spaaace program and your rockets, not by removing the artificial tedium introduced by removing parts of the UI. This only serves to frustrate the player. By the same logic, the ability to timewarp could be disabled until upgrading the tracking station. Or even having no navball until you research that "upgrade". As is, a career mode start has us effectively playing the game at version 0.14, before there were such things as action groups, maneuver nodes, or even patched conics. This is 1.0, there is no good reason for anyone to play without these things anymore. The game is made artificially less fun until playing for a certain length of time, and I think this increases the likelihood of a new player to just quit playing before reaching that point.
