[Hydraa]

Let's look at this another way. To get the free maintance you have to expend 2500 points AND take the merchant trait. This makes this trait more than any of the other advanced traits excpet emotionless (which is worthless in the contest).
I agree that the culture traits are not balanced. Scientists get 5% extra on research. Workers get 5% extra on each of the three minerals. You can't look at just the raw percentages put look at the number of racial points that each area gives you.

I don't want to restart again either. I found the merchant trait beneficail after anaylsis this and put my maintaince at 110% (the point where the additional racial point cost kicked in) so my +5% was worth more racial points then before the break point. This gives me 10% maintainence fee which has been rather sucessful.

This may be an undesired affect by MM but I believe all of us had the availablity to look at the empire set up screens and decide. If we want to take the randomness and skill of creating a race out of it and make it equivalent to a video game then probably need for Twin Galaxies to provide a save game at turn 0. This way we all have the same settings and throw out the factors of setting up the game. I beleive Nyx has mentioned before, they have strict rules on video games in that the players always use the same specs to play on.