Genre's are researched from the "Topic / genre / platforms" section in the research menu. Topics can then be matched for genres / targets in the "Topic DeepDive" section. Researching a genre from the "topic / genre / platform" will give you the information for sliders / design + tech balance. The deepdive info does get expensive if you are trying to mass learn a topic but thats ment for later in the game. At first I am more expecting you to do a few training to get research or contract work then research the genre and hope for good matches with topics then do game reports. Once you make some cash from decent games using the deep dive to learn a few genres for a new topic then making a great match isn't to cost prohibitive. You can check out my game-play vid if you want I recorded a testing session I did if your interested no pressure..
Contract work is currently broken balance wise, I reduced the gains to balance other aspects and I haven't had a chance to balance contract work properly in the new version. This will be fixed very very soon, at the moment contract work is asking for to much its imbalanced for sure. For now if you research a genre and make a game with that genre you will see the info you need to get at least 6+ even if the matches aren't the best. With good matches and good design for small games you will easily get 8/9 once researched.
The game is still very early Dev stage I hope to get some in game tutorial / information together soon I hate seeing people get confused cause I know its my fault. It's a long read but in game the help menu has a huge write up about scoring and systems, I wanted to be very transparent with how my algorithms work.