Ultimately, only ample real-world play-testing can answer these questions from a human perspective.

I share your concern though. You don't want to publish a game only to find, when attacked by real players in quantity, that your design is broken.

For the board game I'm working on, I've found running many simulated games with MCTS-based AI players has proved instructive in some respects. For example, balancing for turn-order fairness.