Thanks for the kind words, and the support!
In terms of why we don't allow knowledge to be changed around... this has been much discussed in the past. The forum archives have the full debates I expect, and I think there may be something on the wiki referring to it, too.
The main reason is that, essentially, knowledge is one of the major reward structures of the game as you play, and getting to adjust your rate of reward and new unlocks seems... pretty much like a cheat. And we already have a cheat that gives you more knowledge if you want it. So the flexibility is there already, you can get a ton of K if you want to experiment around and don't mind the cheat flag on your game, but it's one of those things that destroys balance when you use it as a cheat.
Could it be made to work in a balanced fashion outside of the current cheat implementation? Absolutely, I'm sure it could. The challenge is that requires the AI to get stronger in some comparable way, since you'll have more and/or better ships. OR it requires at least a score adjustment like taking uneven handicaps do. So there's a couple of ways that could work, and really a ton of ways it could be implemented.
But the question I keep coming back to is: why? I agree that flexibility is a good thing, but I think that too many lobby options can be a bad thing. And for something that is already available as a cheat if people want to experiment or "just play," the flexibility is there. It's just not supported as a core non-cheat mode of play. Part of the reason for that is that this game is based around making interesting choices with limited supplies compared to your foe. There's a lot of modes of the game that already deviate from that -- defender mode, multi-planet starts, fallen spire, etc -- but the knowledge thing is a little more core.
There are various other considerations, too, such as the number of planets that players have to take for K and energy reasons, and whether they'd be likely to take enough planets to make the AI a credible threat if the K were adjustable in certain ways. So in other words, players might skimp on territory and then have the game wildly shift in balance with these options, despite whatever on-paper-fine AI compensations we'd have put in from the start. Multi-planet starts took a
long time to get balanced right, for instance, and they're still a very different game from a single-planet start. Come to think of it, that's a way to get a pretty great knowledge boost too, though.
Anyway, I'm not saying we'd never do it, but these are among the reasons we've not done it before, and why I'm not keen to tackle it outside of a major release cycle (next one coming up Q2 next year). It's a possibility that we could do something along these lines, but there's never been a super large amount of player support for it that I recall. One way to gauge that would be to get it into mantis as a suggestion and then get people to vote it up.
Sorry for the stream of consciousness, but I've not thought about this particular issue since before Fallen Spire and so a lot of it was coming back to me in bits and pieces.
