I think Raynor has a good point about all of this. Right now, at some point, research goes completely away as a part of the game. This is bad design decision in my opinion as it removes an important and fun element in the critical end game stages. Maybe the decision wouldn't matter in other 4x games but SE4 offers the player really *long* games. It does matter.
MM didn't really have to do much more than allow you to keep researching to reduce component sizes so you can cram more into your advanced ships. In the late game where everyone has all the high tech goodies this becomes important and allows the building of multi-function ships and more powerful specialized ships.
In addition, MM could have opened up a similar line of research that would allow you to increase facility space on planets once everything else was researched. For each level of research completed, you would get 1 additional facility space on your planets. Again this would continue to allow growth in the late game stages.
This is one case where I think MM did the game a disservice by being swayed by beta-tester input (if that's what really happened) and by not looking for a simpler implementation to prevent the situation that Raynor so accurately describes. The MOO2 model is really the way to go here, IMO.
Maybe the game is flexible enough that a mod can address this shortcoming in some fashion. I hope so, anyway.
The real pity is, I don't think this approach would have been that difficult to code, given the modular approach SE4 takes to ship design and facilities. Maybe Aaron will rethink this decision after people have played the game long enough to reach some definitive conclusions and he has some more time on his hands than he currently does now.
Please understand, I think SE4 is a wonderful game and I love it. It has such tremendous potential. That's why I'm so saddened to learn that such an important component of the design is crippled in an unfortunate way.
[This message has been edited by ColdSteel (edited 10 February 2001).]