I first want to say that the recent upgrades have improved playability immensely. Stuck turns appear to be gone and a small video problem with the left panel not fully extending on the planetary upgrades screen appears to have been fixed. There's much more variety and less redundancy during the end turn screens and that's awesome.

I'm still having a weird issue with individual ship upgrades, like crew quarters, not being sticky and I wonder if it's just me or a glitch. For example, i'll hire a citizen with a high diligence and put them in charge of a special ship and team them up with an explorer craft to go explore anomalies for experience. When the upgrade options trigger, I go to the individual ships and attempt a crew quarters upgrade, which triggers and I can see the changes on the stats of the ship. But, no matter how many time I add crew quarters, it's always available as an upgrade option the next time there are some experience points to spend on the same ship. Since I wasn't around for the GameDev, I don't know if crew quarters is something meant to be upgraded more than once or if it's a bug and the upgrades aren't sticking. If it's meant to be continually upgraded, perhaps something like a "crew quarters +1" could be added and incrementalized after each upgrade so we can tell that it's actually working and not a bug. Because otherwise it plays like crew quarter upgrades aren't sticky and feels buggy.

Another minor issue is that when you do a resource dependant upgrade to a starport or starbase, the individual red "upgrade" arrows on the starbase list doesn't update until you finish the turn. Since some starbase upgrades require different resources, it means you have to double check each starbase still showing the upgrade arrow to be sure you're not overlooking a potential upgrade that turn. Not a problem with a low starbase count, but when you're in a huge galaxy with 50 starbases mid-to-late game this is a huge pain to individually have to click through each base screen to see if another upgrade can be done that turn. I'd much rather have it refresh the starbase upgrade notification arrows after each starbase has been upgraded rather than at the end of turn. I'm not sure if this is possible but one can ask....

I like the new math tweaks. I feel like it's easier to get ahead in the early game now.

I like the option to "cycle" the research focus to get ignored techs back as a researchable option but still wish I could select a tech directly from the tech tree. But, I can live with it now that I know how to ask it to cycle the techs by using the research focus button.

It's getting there. The two new species are fun to play, especially the new plant species with the spores option. They remind me a little of the "Juffo Wup" mycology based species in Star Control.

It's almost there.