In terms of weeks to build a ship makes sense (for a small one) but only 6 weeks to research and develop a new tech? Really? I play on extremely slow long games and one thing I get tired of is setting a production line to find after a few ships I have to change it all because my new tech has made most of those new ships obsolete just during the construction time. It took 5 years for the San Francisco ship yards to build the Enterprise (assuming it was the enterprise Kirk walked by on his way to Starfleet Academy and that he attended about 5 years of course they also built 13 in this time according to TOS) and she was in service for about 15 - 20 years before the NX-2000 Excelsior prototype came out to test the new warp drive (which failed). 
One of the things I did like about Sword of the Stars, despite many other things they got wrong, was that often you needed a group of techs to get a thing (usually a thing that makes better ships). So as you play you get certain benefits from the techs you discover (pop, production, wealth, etc...) but it took sometimes 7 techs before you got the new gear for your ships causing you to upgrade and/or rebuild your fleets. 

As for feel yeah 1 week is too short, months would be better IMO. Because at warp 1 it will take 5 years to get to the nearest star, that is 260 turns! Even with months that is 60 turns where in GalCiv3 I usually get to the first star in 3 to 4 turns ( I play sparse systems I like the idea of taking a while to get there at first). 

I hope it was an enlightening and fulfilling discussion.

More to the point, did you come up with a decision and a due date?  

It would be nice to see the turn number somewhere on the interface without having to hover. You would then also not have to click on the tab to see when you get your next citizen as every tenth turn they would come around. 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,