At this point I wonder if there are some internal politics that want this project to fail and be over. 70 price tag, live service but only on ubisoft platform, ignoring the most demanded features, etc.

It’s like they are tired of a project that was a money black hole for years and they just want to pull the plug.

The texture healing technique is technically brilliant, but imho looks weird.

I will stick to Source Code Pro.

3.0 and 3.3 were big on optimization iirc.

They also moved to the custodian system which makes stellaris easily the most polished and stable of all of Paradox games

Thats not true at all, there has been incredible improve, particularly with jobs.