Optimizing ME Crew Synth Speed Distribution

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I spent a while trying to figure out how to optimize my synth speed and realized I was distributing the crew points wrong. I wrote some python code to go through and check what the best multiplicative effect would be for the Materials Engineer crew member.

I'm curious if this was obvious to others or not:
If, you have under 50 points, its better to level both Ingenuity and Engineering and just distribute the points evenly between the first two synth upgrades.
Right now I have 66 and it was way better to only level Ingenuity; put 25 points into the first and second synth upgrade, and everything else into the bottom left "Masterful Synthing".

To give an Idea of just how much better this is, for 66 points and a crew skill of 1.55, the first method of distributing between the first two upgrades and leveling both on ME gives a total multiplicative boost of 2556.76, but the second method even with only 16 points in the third upgrade gives me a 43798.99 boost.

[phenir]

Yes, because each upgrade is multiplicative with each other. So putting points in the third one, if looked at another way, improves the effect of the first two. Turns out when your third point is, say, a 3x multiplier (for the first point), that kind of beats increasing the other two by 33% via point investment. For synth this is especially so since the third upgrade gets .002 per stat while the other two get .001 and .0005.
The benefit from leveling both stats only affects the first upgrade and it's usually around a third of the primary stat so not a huge loss. However, once you have the divisor remover (420 ranks upgrade), there is less of a reason to only level one stat.