[Alneyan]

The latest version should be 4.1, I believe; I haven't heard of any major upgrade since 4.1 at any rate.

You cannot really remove the Proportions population model, though I guess you could make population meaningless and make it so the AI no longer builds starliners. However, there is an option that allows you to build a facility increasing population by one million every turn in a given system. This makes starliners less important, and you can actually do without starliners altogether.