Thanks for the comment!
You are likely correct and the sell automation should be earlier - I actually wanted to switch the overflow autosell and the second storage expander, but forgot about it.
Regarding slow research - you are probably correct here as well. I did a full run on Saturday prior to submission to iron out balance issues and ended up dividing many research costs by 10, but I might have missed that early research also felt slow. Maybe I was distracted, don't remember right now.
The automation+research problem is definitely on me. I increased the base engineer price since you were able to buy them much before being able to actually use them; by doing so, I forgot that it also made the possibility to hire 2 engineers appear later in the progression, and so the parallel running of both systems was delayed.
Sorry, but I'm not going to fix those balance issues now - this probably doesn't follow the spirit of allowing changes after the submission deadline to fix bugs.