I re-designed the tech tree in the Pointer Mod. My ultimate goal was to make every tech researchable by everybody. Different racial traits would then be defined by the path a race researched through the tech tree.
Unfortunately, it was way too ambitious. I re-designed the tech tree from the ground up and it just proved too much work for one person to re-design all the AI research and ship design files as well.
But if you want to learn from my efforts, you can get a copy of the
Pointer Mod here. The discussion thread is
here.