I recently finished an early version of a mod aimed at making the game play better on insane maps with loose clusters and common or occasional stars/planets here.  Given that I've already done a massive amount of adjustment to the tech trees (with more as likely planned), I'm strongly considering splitting them from age of expansion/war/ascension/victory into two or three tech ages for each of the first three tech ages, if there are ai modders who think the more fine grained filtering would give them better flexibility and were willing/interested in making their own compatible ai scripts.  I wanted to make a separate thread from the mod itself to discuss that possibility to avoid derailment though.