[Fyron]

Note that I did not make the mod, or have much to do with its development.

The population modifiers look like the ones SJ made for a system where production capacity goes up as you add more people, but at some point the entire world starts getting paved over for housing and such, limiting the area that can be used for farms and mines and whatnot. SY rates keep going up though. Thus, there is a sweet spot for pop levels of resource producing worlds, and a tradeoff between production and high build rates. SY rate is infinitely increasing, but resource production follows a bell curve (or something similar).

I imagine SJ wrote a simple VB script to generate the pop modifiers according to a simple formula.