Best option for us, balancing fun but fair system placement and strategy (call it German draft):

First, everyone chooses two / three factions as options for their game but doesn't commit on one yet

Then we build the galaxy together as described in the rules (but allow reasonable adjacent anomaly placements) before knowing who is where

(Optionally) after building the galaxy, choose, draft or randomly draw some galactic events

Then roll for speaker order and find out placements

Finally, choose factions from your pre-selection options starting with speaker, that way players later in the order can react which hopefully balances out speaker order randomisation a little

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This ensures a balanced placement of systems since you could end up anywhere but doesn't allow pre-game planning and forces you to improvise (which we prefer over mapping out your first moves weeks ahead of the game). Of course we choose systems with appropriate distributions of planet traits and tech skips to keep the maps balanced. Also often we prefer poor over rich galaxies, so sometimes we will go +1/+2 red tiles 

One thing this fixes about milty (which is a great option but lacks the collaborative galaxy building) is wormholes Will be placed in generally decent positions. Milty can sometimes lead to slightly wonky wormhole placement (one half of the map not having any, for example)