Just for clarification, are you saying that a second invasaion of Finland was on the agenda as well for 1941, to basically try to achieve the Allied objectives for Norway, but from the East? Or were you just comparing the projected Germany campaign with the way they went for both the population center, and the northern resources, i.e. the Baltic coast? One thing I find exasperating is the way so many writers sympathetic to the Finnish cause get huffy about the Continuation War with the whole "how dare they get in bed with the Nazis!" moralizing. But if Stalin let the Finns walk away with so much in the peace (relatively speaking, of course; the Finnish concessions were horrific, but they retained their independance unlike every other European country [Norway doesn't count] bordering the USSR), because he was planning a second go-round to retake the only Czarist province to elude his grasp, once Germany was otherwise engaged, that should quell even the most sanctimonious objections to Finland's subsequent alliance.

Actually, that might also explain why Stalin would allow a former Russian province to retain its sovereignty, namely, that he did not intend to, but the Finns proved too troublesome to hold down while also fighting Germany, especially in light of the interest in Finland's cause lethargically stirring to life in the West.

Molotov's behavior was another signal, acting as brusquely toward his German counterparts as he might toward Soviet subordinates. There was a difference in most civilized minds (and I do not except Hitler from that category, as his sins are of a kind) between "falling into one's sphere of influence" and outright annexation. Stalin was behaving like a greedy bully, rather than applying the same sort of influence Hitler used in Eastern Europe. The lack of the minimal affected delicacy the Nazis used suggested the Soviets were aiming at something bigger and the Romanian and Baltic seizures were merely prefunctory stepping stones.

As for the economic threats, that was one area in which Hitler was preoccupied, often to the chagrin of his generals who were focussed solely on military problems (the Reichsheer having weeded out potential Ludendorffs who did fight to conquer, rather than solve a technical exercise of defeating the enemy). He called off the offensives in Operation Citadel, despite the fact that they were advancing successfully, and the Russians having thrown almost all their chips into that pot with not much left if Manstein & Model could keep going or even link up. The reason he gave Manstein was that the fall of Sicily and the imminent invasion of Italy made Ploesti vulnerable to Allied bombers operating out of Italy, or an invasion across the Adriatic. He approved the extremely risky Norwegian gambit, despite his uncertainty regarding naval operations, to protect the Swedish iron, and while the Avranche & Ardennes counterattacks were probably mostly desperate attempts to achieve moral victories and dissuade the American people & politicians from prosecuting the war, trying to retain France and its own contributions to German production had to have also been a part of it.

I could see them letting a rump state remain nominally independant beyond the Urals, the way a number of counterfactual Nazi victory scenarios have suggested, but they'd still want an amenable authority in charge, rather than a resentful survivor of the Bolshevik regime. While they might have planned to colonize Eastern Europe with Germans, European Russia alone is an awfully big bite to digest, and one that any surviving Russian state would not want getting away. It does make Hitler's intentions puzzling, since he tended to be more politically astute and realistic. He clearly wanted to end the Bolshevik regime and seize the agricultural and mineral resources with an eye to making Germany a self-sufficient continental power, but his treatment of Vlasov suggests he had no interest in the survival of any sort of Russian state. But even the most horrific possibilities remaining seem absurdly out of the realm of physical capability. Could they actually run 170 million Soviet subjects through concentration camps? Prior to the war, Hitler wanted Poland as an ally, like Hungary and Romania, as they too had historical grievances against Russia and feared the Soviets more than the Nazis. He might have planned to turn on the Poles once he got all his use out of them, but regardless of his "betrayal" of Stalin, it was not in character with his behavior toward allies and favors done. The alliance with Stalin was nothing more than a temporary measure, and anti-Bolshevism was a dominant plank in his platform from the first. For his other allies, he frequently took actions that would have costly consequences, in defiance of the dictates realpolitik, such as his involvement in the Balkans & Africa, diverting costly resources from the Russian campaign (proprotionately small as the Afrika Corps might have been, it was one of the small number of well-equipped units on which the Wehrmacht relied at the Schwerpunkt, and commanded by one of Hitler's star generals; Rommel and a couple of mechanized division might have made a crucial difference at Stalingrad, for instance), or dropping a gift into Roosevelt's lap by declaring war on America in support of Japan. He might have underestimated his priority in the administration's war aims or the real weight of American capabilities, but he also spent the 20s & 30s harping on how foolish the prior regime had been to fight a two front war, so he could not have been insensible to the danger of bringing the Western Front back to life, but he gave us the excuse anyway, out of solidarity to a distinctly non-Aryan ally.

I'd think the pragmatic utility of Vlasov would have occured to Hitler at the very least, unless the same scruples that compelled him to live up to his promise to Mussolini after the Anschluss that he would never forget the favor, prevented him from making such use of a man he would have liquidated once the war was won. That still seems really unlikely.

The only thing I can think of is that Hitler really didn't believe the USSR would be much of a difficulty. On paper, he's probably right, since they came within a hair of victory several times, with Murphy's Law running rampant. The problem with the Germany military was that they weren't as good as they appeared in the 25 months or so immediately following the outbreak of the war. In some places, they won with overwhelming force, while in others, their opponents were psychologically defeated and politically checkmated. What ability and genuine proficiency the Wehrmacht actually demonstrated was likely an institutional legacy of the Imperial military and by extension, the Prussian army which created the German state in the 1860s & 70s. It was in the developments specific to WW2 that their shortcomings were exposed, such as aircraft & armor development. Contrary to popular history, they were not successful because of new "Blitzkrieg" tactics or an innovative combined arms style of fighting. The former is highly suspect in its efficacy, proposed by armchair theoreticians before the war, and like most aspects of air power, "proven" by confirmation bias, while combined arms techniques were old news, and something Germany used to great effect in WW1. Their prewar armor was crap, and the more impressive tanks developed during its course were not good products, merely more heavily armed and armored. Their aircraft were acceptable in the late 30s, but until they made the jet breakthrough, didn't improve much or develop the sorts of planes needed later in the war, and production of both types of armaments was appalling, particularly given Goring's prewar assertion that Hitler was more concerned with the numbers of weapons, rather than their quality or efficacy.

Really, Hitler got as far as he did on the basis of his insight into the moral weakness of his adversaries. Assessments of Soviet military weakness might have been spot-on, but German military capability was also illusory, to a lesser degree, and they were unable to recover from temporary setbacks before the whole weight of America was thrown into the game, and made Soviet propaganda victories stand up by providing a defeated antagonist to make the stories seem true.