I think it looks good.
That's a pretty huge difference in tech rate. I'd be interested in seeing the victory screen of the two games to get a better idea of how the game is going.
The recent and better match has 3 fallen empires, the older match ranks 3 & 4 are other players and there are 2 fallen empires, that one is also an egalitarian fanatic xenophile life-seeded start, which I think is the biggest thing holding me back. The main difference between the two is I've practiced my economy; instead of trying to get tech as fast as possible, I expand and set up a solid base, so when I do start building tech, I can do so without wrenching my economy. As you can see from the screenshots, my planets are much healthier than before, and their composition can be very different because of that. I also got better at tech beelining, including a trick I don't hear anyone talking about; get a lot of trade early on (clerks if necessary) on a colony and don't protect it's trade route, bait out pirates, destroy them, scan them, don't do anything with it. Scanned wreckage makes the techs permanent options, meaning if you leave them unstudied, they and all subsequent techs will never clog up your 3-5 randomized tech options, if you can make do without armor 2, etc, you can cut out half of the engineering tech pool, and make synthetic personality matrix (which has no weights, thanks devs) appear far more frequently, I synthetically ascend by year 80 now. You'll probably think this screenshot is impossible when you examine it, but I've also done some math and found that several of the 'trash tier' picks are actually among the best in the game. I'm editing a write up on the subject, it'll probably be done later today, and you won't believe me until you've seen the math yourself. The tier lists are wrong, Rapid Breeders/Intelligent/Unruly are not good, Docile is. (how is federation score calculated? the old match started sooner and with larger partners, the new started late cause I had to indoctrinate/uplift primitives to get any empire with appropriate ethics to federate with, you can see the tiny spot in my empire that is my only federation ally, this doesn't make sense...)