[PvK]

This is a great idea, and there are lots of good sub-ideas here. I had fiddled with similar ideas, but as Dogscoff says, I probably won't ever get time to do them myself.

I would suggest making the "normal tech" tech area actually cost a pretty high number of points (whatever it's actually worth) and then adding a disadvantage everyone can take to give them enough points to buy it. This is what I did in Foundations, and it makes it possible to add other types of races (swarm, extradimensionals, pirate, monster, whatever) as well, and keep creation point balance. I called the normal tech "Industrial Construction" in Foundations, although I wasn't entirely happy with the term.

QuarianRex, the game does know the difference between components with the same name.

For Intel of primitives, perhaps give their facilities a small level of Intel, and then give them a fairly good racial-tech defense mission, and little or no offensive intel missions.

PvK