I have been running on a huge map. The general area you get before you make first contact is critical, of course. With settings on occ/occ I started a game with no habitable planets in my area. Then I cranked up to common planets, still occ habitable.
I got 28 stars and 39 planets (there were 2 systems with 4 planets) in my starting area. 3 planets were habitable - 5 - 9 and 13. Guess I need to go common/common. The number of stars for this area is about what I would have expected (I was at the tail end of a spiral galaxy). I am not counting the home system here.
Yes, I understand this is a tweaking problem. If I can point out something else dreadfully obvious, is that it's a very critical tweaking problem. The default settings should give a 99 % chance of a reasonably playable start (which I realize is subjective to everyone, but still). To me a half dozen or so habitable planets in 30 stars is about right as near the minimum. You have to hunt for them but they can be found.
In Beta 2 I thought the default settings were about right, I even from time to time got two habitable planets in one system.
Related issue: I noted the frequency of asteroids, nebulae, and ores in my starting area. There were 16 asteroid fields and 12 had ore. 10 nebulae, and 3 had ore. (default settings). I think I remember one of the devs mentioning the amount of ore might be a bit of whack in this build. The nebular/ore seems about right though.