Anything that increases the choices in Diplomacy are a good thing! I like both ideas and suspect that when the (Tasty Torians)tm arrive we will see changes to the Extreme planets. 

Disagree.  I knid of like the idea that some species just aren't creative enough to discover certain tech and they have to steal or trade for the tech.

Besides, that wouldn't be consistent with the back story of the game itself and the theory that perhaps some species would never discover certain tech on their own.  In otherwords, despite the drengin being a very advanced civilization while humanity was clubbing tigers with animal skin underwear to get the girl, they never managed to discover hyper drive.  For whatever reason, the dregin mastered the technology of torture but never figured out hyper drive in thousands upon thousands of years.  I dont know if I buy that theory, as it seems to me some gifted dregin would eventually discover hyper drive, but the lore being what it is, different races should have different techs.

Also, another oddity... Aren't races technically variations of the same species?  For example, humans can be of the African American race, Caucasion race, etc.  Instead of racial traits it should be unique species traits.  The different civilizations are entirely different species.  Perhaps only the Korath and the Dregin would use the term different races.

The current limit on if a tech is tradable or brokerable is if the other side has one with the same GenericName(I think?).  While UPResolutions.xml has votes that can restrict either for specific classes of tech (something that can be trivially modded in for new categories), I've not been able to find a way to attach these functions to something active without a vote (i.e. tech tree or something) to give more fine grained control over what can be done with techsI'd be pretty surprised if this changed in beta5