On paper some of these ideas are good, in general making things more impactful to the game. But damn, if my first experience with the game was waiting 5 turns for a probe and 10 turns for my first tech I'd have quit out of boredom and probably never gotten into the game.

It's like every change is dialed up to 11. Which is fine, but a bit of false advertising maybe? Dial the changes down to like 25-50% of base cost / value and this would be a "balancing" mod. Right now I'd call this an overhaul.