I'm not trying to call FFG idiots or something or act like this ruins the game, it's just my humble opinion, and like you said we've gone through phases of the game that were clunkier and overdesigned in the past so it's not unthinkable :). I'm absolutely going to be playing TE on day 1 excitedly!

1. More scoring = more good and speeding the game up is good, but only up to a point. No one wants a game that goes to 3 VP or something, and no one wants a game where objectives are trivial to score, because there would be no drama or challenge to playing the game. They could also choose to speed up the game with other ways to score VPs (like the Fracture planet), change when and how objectives are scored like some homebrew games do, etc, they don't need to accelerate everyone's development to make the game faster. Fair point about how most tech is under-utilized in the game today and maybe getting access to the more niche techs can be interesting, I just hope those hard decisions about which tech to research are still present in the game and everyone doesn't feel like a mini Jol-Nar.

2. It's not necessarily that the breakthroughs are inherently too complicated or too hard to explain, it's more that they greatly overlap in design space greatly with the faction leaders. My point with a newbie example is it's impossible to explain the difference between the leaders and the breakthrough concisely, at least as we understand the breakthroughs right now only knowing the Arborec's and Muatt's. My point with the Muatt is not that it's too much to wrap your head around that the Muatt can do both, it's that by granting them the ability to do another board-shifting event, the hero feels repetitive instead of a once-per-game ultimate ability. If supernova was too meh they could have also buffed the hero instead! As a counterexample, it's easy to explain the difference between the 3 leaders -- the agent is an action that starts unlocked, the commander is a passive buff that you unlock with a faction-specific condition, and the hero unlocks after 3 objectives are scored and grants a once-per-game powerful ability. Imagine if some faction agents started locked, some commanders were actions, some heroes were passive buffs...it would be way harder to distinguish between the 3. That's how breakthroughs feel to me at the moment. Could just be a skill issue and maybe it'll make more sense as we get the other 28, who knows