Well done on finishing the game, and I'm glad you seemed to enjoy it. I felt like adding something like the events is kinda pivotal for strategy games in general. These are games where the point is to figure out the best way to do a thing, but if you do that then you have figured it out and there's no more gameplay. A changing effect like in this case the events can in my humble opinion put the strategy back into the strategy game by making you rethink the strategy ...... STRATEGYYYY!!!
Also Gather Reference is indeed too strong. The reason for this is that the full idea is to have 3 main projects each run and then if you do that to have a big final endless one. This means that the studied effect applied by the ability would be removed 3 times rather then once as it is in this barebones version. This would automatically make it significantly weaker (maybe even too weak???). I chose to leave it in this state for the jam simply cuz I thought it would be funny and most people wouldn't notice how stronk it actually is.