I've made the same observations many betas ago. It still doesn't work.

The population cap doesn't work either. You can get large populations as the Yor.

It hasn't worked ever since they tried to move away from using a project to grow population, and instead replaced it with a planet improvement.

To be fair, the questions are often maddeningly vague.  I plan on asking a pretty concise and direct as possible about this during the next devstream. Hopefully it'll be concise enough to get through the chaos of a chat environment.  

Sorry, I was one of those vague questioners but afterwards I posted in the support forums and got a response from a Stardock employee saying it was added to the list.  I agree its very frustrating that the devs don't seem to realize its been broken since the second pass on the Yor.