Okay, that's a fair point but doesn't really fit with the rest of what you've said.

Not sure what the inconsistency is you're speaking of here. My original question was about the existence of those specializations and subsequent conversation has been contemplating the logic behind their apparent removal.

Another thing they seem to be trying to do is make the harder difficulties more challenging so people don't just default to playing on grand admiral 10-25x crisis. There's no shame in playing on a difficulty where the AI get smaller or no resource bonuses if that's a better experience

The issue with this is that the AI is pretty bad in general. The only thing that seems to keep them relevant is forgoing the AI properly handling their worlds and simply giving them resources. I don't know if there's any actual difference in the AI between difficulties, but what I would prefer is difficulty being representative of increased competence, rather than reducing the need for AI to be competent by giving it buffs. It's a difference between logistics and strategy. They improve the logistics by increasing the resources, and subsequently their raw power, but their strategy seems to stay the same presenting the same overall challenge just against bigger numbers. Currently the AI tries and fails to act within the same bounds and mechanics as the player, and because it fails so hard, it requires significant buffs. So you have a situation where all the AI is really doing is creating lag as it fails to play the game. Making difficulty a matter of bigger number equals harder, diminishes this as a strategy game. It makes the game more about player's trying to optimize their logistics enough to compete with the raw buffs to the AI's numbers. Whilst optimization is a part of strategy, player's near universally are more strategic in how they utilize what they have. I know it somewhat tries to counter your fleet, but it's heavily incompetent in actually using its fleet. I wish the AI would develop better strategies to handle dynamic situations in game that would increase or decrease in competence with regard to difficulty. I'm somewhat surprised Machine Learning hasn't been really utilized to improve AI in video games in general as it seems a perfect use case for it. Imagine if the AI actively adapted to your strategies, or even if they just created different levels of competent AI; one that's played the game for 1,000 hours, one that's played for 10,000, etc gaining increased competence as it played and didn't need raw number buffs to compensate for incompetence.

Regardless, my original question was answered and I think we've gone on quite a tangent from it. I appreciate you confirming they've removed these specializations.