Rlaney, don't worry - I'm happy you're enjoying Proportions and are trying new things out! It would be cool if you could get it to work ok with limited resources - I just assumed it wouldn't work.
It sounds to me like you could use the resource improvement abilities to compensate for the drain on homeworlds. I guess ideally, you would want to make the drain just slightly higher than the replenishment, but it will be hard to balance, I think, also if an empire takes advanced storage techniques or reduced planet exploitation, it will throw off your balancing.
I had intended to include resource depletion in the larger Version of the mod (Foundations), by using negative resource improvement abilities while playing an "infinite resources" game. That would give a much more realistic pace to resource depletion than the "finite resources" mechanic, and it wouldn't throw away the extraction rate modifiers the way that "finite resources" does. The only problem is that, at least when I tested it back around 1.57 or so, setting negative values on resource improvement had no effect. I explained this in a report to MM, but I haven't bothered to test to see if he actually made a change - there is no note in the history.txt file about a change, but not all changes appear there. I'd be obliged if you'd like to give it a test. Make a facility with resource improvement at -50 or so and then sit it on a planet for over a year, and see if the resource levels go down at all. If it does... it'll be really cool.
PvK