This is indeed an issue. You can trade for the techs in the Planetology branch, but don't get any of the benefits (extreme world colonization, terraforming). Makes it nonviable to play these civs. And I haven't checked, but it is very likely the silicon/synthetic AI suffer because of this as well.
This NEEDS to be fixed. I've been playing since the start (not a founder, but got the game right away upon release), and do not generally complain about persistent bugs, but this one is pretty bad.
For the record, I have all the DLC, except for the Mecha shipsets.