Yes, I've seen this on and off through a couple of versions (including betas). Since being able to have custom races, I usually play with a lot more races than you mentioned. What I've seen is that there will always be some that focus their tech research on something other than drives, some even for most if not all of the game, so you see what you're seeing. I personally don't think it's too big an issue now, if it even is one, based on the options I choose to play with., i.e., Excessive-Insane sized galaxies, 40-50 major races, rare-abundant minors, gifted AI, etc. The races are supposed to be unique and different from each other. As it's only some and not all of the races doing this, I'm not worried. It's not even the majority doing it either so that's good news. I look at it as being those individual differences of each race. I also would never want all races to have certain rules that they all adhere to either in terms of how they react or what they would research, etc. We're supposed to encounter some races that we would consider crazy because their priorities are so much different than ours... I mean, come on, they're aliens, they're supposed to be weird and do things a lot differently than we do, at least some of them anyway. I would definitely raise alarms if the majority of them did it though. Look at the stats of the races that do it, often times seeing their characteristics will explain their priorities.