I had retried it by putting down other storage spaces and that had appeared to fix the issue. Thanks!
Also, you were not wrong in setting a timer to induce a tense and stressful finality. Personally, I think you need to re-add the timer as all the stress I felt before evaporated upon seeing that I had no time-wall and could quite literally ignore the research speed upgrade if I wanted to with little to no consequence. It keeps the pace just enough to where I'm not going to just sit around and watch it cap out.