I am constantly treated as being weak by the other races, despised because of it (it seems), and constantly having war declared on me, despite the fact that my smaller number of ships are easily capable of wiping out anything the enemy could possibly throw at me.

I think the folks handling the AI might wanna think about balancing things out for technological superiority when determining the "Military Power" of a race. I mean, if, once all logistics bonuses are taken into account, the enemy could send every ship they have at ONE single ship in my fleet and not even harm it with everything they have, then I don't see how they could determine my race is weak militarily. Especially if I have 5 or 6 of these ships that would simply eradicate everything they throw at me.

I am just suggesting that, for the AI, folks might work a little on taking the relative power of one's technology into account before determining whether or not an AI decides a race is weak. OR maybe if they declare war and suddenly discover they are dealing with a vastly technologically superior race they might second guess their decision and call for peace? So far the only way I have determined to get them to decide the war is pointless is to overwhelm them with fleets of massively overpowered warships, crushing their fleets and invading their planets... Which is a huge annoyance when you're trying to focus on something else.

Or maybe after 15 turns of not even taking a single planet and losing every single battle they fight with my race they should automatically ask for peace?

There should be some kind of modifiers involved when other races realize they are basically little more than flies buzzing around the heads of giants who aren't even interested in fighting them to begin with!