A couple other factors:
Fyrons Quadrant Mod. I love this mod and it's used in a lot of PBW games so I assume many of us love it. The problem is, it doubles (or more?) the number of planets and thereby doubles the ships, units, resources etc. but most especiallly micro-management. I find I can handle only half the games I could handle 2 years ago; the turns take twice as long!
High resource asteroids. These make remote miners etc. very profitable. Even better, when you have enough stellar manip. you can build your own planets, build a space yard then monoliths and before you know it you can't build ships fast enough to spend it all. In the end, once again you have more ships, more resources and more micro-management... and fewer games ongoing.
Yes I'm a little burned out myself, but I am looking forward to starting a small scale game when things calm down.
