I think that is a great choice, giving the imperial palace some more weight. Actually the cultural archives are dominaiting your home world, if looked at ressource outputsince the policy slots is a empire-wide meter, you need to link it to some unique something, and that should be the imperial palace.
Me too. Even if the first one is not to far away, if it is scrapped due to the bad trait, that would be very frustrating for me. For me there would be two solutions: Either increasing the amount of social slots from techs a lot or change the discussed trait to "bad social race" -> 0 Slots for Palace, "average" -> 1 bonus slot, "good social" -> 2 bonus slots.However, I find the lack of a social slot in early game quite annoying. And the lack of enough social slots in general also a bad thing.
The last one could be connected with policies that grants new social slots, like the infrastructure ones for economic slots. I think diversity could be such a policy that opens up another social slot (but only one, not that many as the infrastructure policies does).
Just run into negative IP stockpile at the very beginning, giving me rebels on every planet. Is that always going on? As far as I see you get rebels if your influence got negative or if your stability is negative. I remember in the beginning it was discussed to reduce the stability on planets if IP stockpile is negative. Maybe that would be a good choice, because you had some time to act.Anyway, there's a bunch of ground battle sitreps the moment you go in to negative influence.
Next thing is the slow increasing amount of IP production with only +1 per turn. Maybe there should be a tech that increase that to +3 like "force energy structures" for RP and PP growth. It would be very more easy to react on running out of IP stockpile. One game I had to change halve of my colonies to IP production to not run into negative but 20 turns later I hat +60 IP per turn...