Setting OwnerPlayerIndex doesn't work.  If there's a way to set all of the starting settings (AI personality type, race, difficulty), it would at least make restarting until you get the position you want possible if you're trying to get a 1 vs AI map to work.

Yeah, the loot level thing seems odd too, the exception thrown when you put a value over 3 says it's too high - (3), but if you set the value to 3 it says it's too much. Setting the loot value to 1 or 2 doesn't throw an exception, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.  Hopefully there's a patch soon.

On the note of OwnerPlayerIndex, while it doesn't seem to correspond to the slot of the lobby players, you can however set multiple start planets, in the case of vasari, I find myself starting with 2x the starting fleet, one for both planets i set as player 1 when I successfully get the right starting spot.

As for artifacts, there's some debug options set to false in one of the setting files, one of which seems to be a GUI to add items to the ships, can't figure out how to access it even when setting it to true though.

Are there any news to this?
Not being able to fix the starting position is really a pain in the A**. OwnerPlayerIndex has no effect at all.

It's not even random, but depending on how I size the teams and what difficulty I set the AI to, I always start at the same position.
There's only one combination which gives me the starting position I want, and that's pretty boring, because I have to set it to lower difficulty settings and create more teams than I want to...

You may need to update your SolarForge. There are new(er) parameters in the top-left box (near the planet counts) which include "ArePlayerSlotsRandomized". Specify the OwnerPlayerIndex and set that parameter to false, and it should work now.