From Multianna's magnificent ingame videos (thanks!) I know that I don't like the relation of development speeds in SoaSE much.
Thus I'd like to ask: Can the player can adjust this at game-start?
I would e.g. keep the movement speed but multiply research time by 2 or 3 and production time by something of a similar magnitude.

In Multianna's video I can't see such an option so I'd like to suggest it. The setting is reasonably intuitive for almost all users and could perhaps be added to 'custom galaxy' window or something similar so it doesn't bother users who don't want to bother with it.
Besides lacking a down-side the proposal has the up-side that players can adjust the game to their style. There are users on this board who play in huge systems with many planets and absolute action-RTS style carnage and other players who play with just 6 planets per system and a completely different pace. Such a broad band of users would surely like to customize the game-speeds.

Regarding multiplayer my stance is that even though such a setting would split the action-oriented players from the slow-pace-slouchies I don't think that's a bad thing since those players wouldn't like competing with each other much anyway.