I love worldbuilding! Most of my short stories are just cool ideas for a singular concept applied to unique worlds that I make up, and I spend endless hours fantasizing about the intricacies of how those worlds would work and figuring out solutions to problems that may arise from their often paradoxical natures. I wish there were a genre of literature dedicated to "describing fantasy worlds", which readers would pick up without the expectation of a story or even any charactersto focus on-- I would relish the opportunity to write a few books to go on that shelf

I wholeheartedly agree with your critique of theoretical over-bearing writers. Though my studies of literature, and from what I picked up from various writing courses, I have found that wordiness is almost never good, and bogging the reader down with unnecessary details get tedious and monotonous very fast, and ultimately ends up contributing little to the story. Just like you said, it's great to have the ins-and-outs of an entire world in your head, but the best way to develop it is through details given during the course of the story, and only when they're called for and relevant. Personally, being a fellow positively full of words, I do not mind in the slightest when an author decides to go into ridiculous depth to describe a world or scene; I am very patient and love such things. However, I am aware that I am one of very few such people, and that the majority of people I've encountered much prefer short, sesinct, plot-driven narratives, and that despite my forgiveness of overdone description the story itself may suffer due to it as a written work.

I used to be one of those when I was younger, a writer who wanted to show off the effort put into a written work or even an artwork, but with time I learned the value of quality over quantity, and how to effectively write stories with fewer words and with deeper meaning and emphasis. Personally, though, if I were to publish a fantastic tale with a great big thought-out world, I would keep all that content out of my story but would not be able to resist putting in a nice little history and reference of the world as a couple dozen pages in the back, tucked behind the epilogue

Mmh. Myself, I would be rather inclined to publish the reference book regarding the fictional world afterwards, in a separate book, so that I can make a bit more money, ensure that anyone who gets it is rather likely to read it, and to give myself more space to work in.

It would even be interesting to create a whole grand world and flesh it out like that, and then let other people go ahead and write awesome stories to take place in that setting and take advantage of the resource you provided

Would certainly make for interesting reads which you can appreciate so much more knowing they're taking place in a world that is yours, and would let writers get creative and populate that large world with characters from many different authors. It's an interesting concept.

Mmh. The only real problem with that is that I don't trust other authors to do the job right.

On the point about deciding the last five million years of the planet's history; I do much the same, but with a difference: as I go back in time I think "hey, there's some good story potential in this historical happening - I could write a prequel set in it!" over and over until the first chapter of story 1 starts to look like the grand conclusion of an era-spanning series.

Well, when I talk about that, I mean more like geological and climatological stuff that shaped the history of the world, in addition to the world's recent evolutionary history. The stuff with proper story potential (unless I'm writing a fictional natural history piece, in which case all bets are off) doesn't really start until a little bit before the dawn of civilization on that world.