Well my 40 about to be 50 employed scientists are relatively cheap to pay, it's getting them the labs they need that hurts. I pull in 700,000 a month now and get to keep nearly 300,000 after expenses. All in all I felt like I have enough money for all I NEED to do and money leftover to improve Phalanx overall.
Really I felt like 2.4 had nice rates of happiness gain and loss for nations and 2.5 is babying me. There are so few UFOs I can't really miss them... the only trouble is abusing the range of Sparrowhawks to bring down fighters. Anything that gets in range of one is vaporized, no chance to win, but a Stilletto can just bomb them from outside their range until they go down. This would seem abusable and broken were those missiles not rather pricey. Even so it may be worth looking in to. There's never a fair fight with Fighters, one side or the other is always utterly doomed by the weapons load-outs.
The Nations have slowly crept up in happiness over time often for no reason I can explain. I complete a Mission in Oceania and sell the UFO to America and suddenly Asia is Exuberant, names of nations fudged but I have seen that sort of scenario. In 2.4 I had to work like heck to get to Happy or stop them from slipping, now I feel like I'd have to try to make them upset.
Interestingly while the Geoscape seems trivially easy now the tactical missions have become much much harder. The aliens are just fighting better. What really gets me is that auto-battle doesn't seem to have caught up and feels like a cheat. If I go in to a mission I will probably loose at least 1 or 2 people, maybe good ones, even after retrying a couple times. I have never seen a Phalanx soldier die during auto-battle.