How can I learn to scale my project?
Viewing an application as a series of state transitions instead of a blizzard of actions and events is a way under appreciated design perspective. This is one of they key design approaches for making robust embedded systems. A great paper talking about this sort of stuff is Mission Planning and Execution Within the Mission Data System - an effort to make engineering flight software more straightforward and less prone to error through the explicit modeling of spacecraft state. Another interesting paper is CLEaR: Closed Loop Execution and Recovery High-Level Onboard Autonomy for Rover Operations.
In general I call these Fact Based Architectures. I'm really glad neilk brought it up.