Not seeing the love for Ion Starships - sounds like Sentinals to me. And Starships already got enough ships imo.
So yeah, i voted for Jump gates, not drives. Why? Because i have been asking for that for a long long time (even before suggestion forum existed ,p) because its cheaper (tactical, not resource wise) to scrap even large fleets that are stuck in some remote place and rebuild them elsewhere) if theres no easy path back - or if its very long (10+ jumps) Especially the homeworld attack fleets suffer this problem, when the 2 homeworlds are very apart its faster to scrap and rebuild than move and replace.
Also Alert on Colonies and Rebel(or whatever ,p) Outposts needs to be there . Visual alert, not sound alert. I actually lost my human settlement once to a single infilitrator - i never even noticed it there because the enemy count was always 1, so i assumed a cloaked engineer somewhere..