That wasn't really the point of what I was saying however. The point is that having the reduction on ships is less useful than the reduction would be if it applied to things other than ships because the mineral savings on ships is not that big, and absolutely not enough to warrant the extreme hyperbole that is "your ships cost less than dirt" even without taking into account that upkeep is unaffected which means the actual savings are much smaller than the 15% saved on the construction itself for anything but colony ships since they are "consumed" quickly.
Regrowing the population that you purge off takes many, many, many in game years unless it was conquered shortly after it was settled during which time it would operate at a small fraction of what it does when someone who can keep the pops conquers the same planet. Using neutering counteracts this fairly well but the amount of extra planets you would have to conquer very early is not really feasible when weighed against the cost of the attacks, as well as continued upkeep of an oversized military fleet, that could instead be spent on non-military development. You don't really get many corvettes for the cost of one colony ship. If one builds a basic starting corvette and it lives for 14 years that's already enough to have built one colony ship. It's just more efficient to use those minerals on internal development to snowball to the point where you can roll over everyone with minimal losses. (The fact that Driven Assimilators do not have the drawback of having to purge and instead just gets to fully integrate every conquered pop into the empire quickly is why they are so overpowering when compared to all the other genociders, because having to purge is a colossal drawback.)
There are, however, a few cases where this does not hold true.
1) In the unfortunate circumstance that you get boxed in early. It happens, but unless you're playing on a galaxy that has a very high amount of empires in relations to its size it is rare.
2) You are playing on a galaxy with a very low amount of habitable planets.
3) The difficulty setting of AI empires is not at a point where it provides any challenge even in the early game with potential difficulty bonuses.
The common theme for both case 1 and 2 is that your opportunity for spending on development within your borders gets very restricted, in which case you have to fight yourself out or you will suffer for it. While these are cases where FP is stronger than they otherwise would be, it either happens too rarely, or is too dependent on very specific galaxy settings to be too much of a consideration. In the case of number 3, while that could be a valid argument too, I don't consider it as such because unless the game is set at a level where the individual is faced with challenging opponents the entire process is devalued.
I also think it is worthy of note that if there were difficulty settings above Grand Admiral with advanced starts, FP would scale worse into it because the more dangerous your opponents are to you, the worse FP gets both on account of its weaker economic potential as well as its diplomatic penalty because you're much more likely to get smashed by stronger enemies.
Quick is not synonymous with best. It is also very easy to switch out of pacifism thanks to the worm in waiting event which can be forced with little effort.
