One thing that irks me is that you can only have human standard years for lifeforms. I would of liked to seen lifeforms who lasted either 10 years or 500 years.

But I have RPed where you cannot do research unless you have a scientist with that specialization, to basically simulate non consistent breakthroughs of research. You can get some interesting fleet results RPing like this.

Another related topic that irks me is the age at which new personnel seem to join you, 21???
I do not see too many 21 year old lieutenant commanders or colonels going around, let alone administrators of whole planets
Surely an age of about 30 + a random number of years is more appropriate for senior officers, administrators and prominent scientists to become available.   Again low hanging fruit.  .  . 

I don't mind the young ages of new recruits.   Desperate times call for lots of hiring.

Only if you turn auto-assignments on.

Ahh, thank you for the correction.

Officers of all levels are discharged from the service after 6-7 years of no assignments.  If you are building a substantial ground force the officers will have assignments and not be discharged and the ranks will grow over time.  The navel officer numbers will remain somewhat static in relation to the academy level.  Thankfully, scientists and administrators do not suffer the same fate. 

It would be interesting to see the game dynamic of having scientists and administrators using the same revolving door that ground and navel officers have.  Increase the rate of their hiring but if you don't put them to work somewhere they will eventually leave for greener pastures.  Which leads me to an entirely different question of why scientists and administrators are tied to a military academy?  I would like to see them separated out to being produced from a university.  While avoiding the minefield of subsidizing scientist specialization this would allow some granular control over the non military staff production rates.  The presence of a military academy or a university building in a colony could also be tied to a general improvement in research rates of the local labs or military capability of stationed ground or orbiting navel forces.

4 Bio, 2 Energy, 2 Sensor, 1 MK

My propulsion tech is going veeeeeery slooooowly and I have about 5 academies now and working on another 5. At least I have lots of spare bodies for various teams and task forces.

Any thoughts on the optimum number of academies to give a reasonable chance of scientists in each field after a few years?

In my current game, I don't have a huge fleet at the moment so I don't want a heap of unassigned naval officers, I have a few excellent scientists in sensors, propulsion etc but need some other areas (construction in particular) and I am thinking of building a few more academies.
I guess most people choose their number of academies on the basis of military and administration needs rather than scientists.

Would be nice if you had universities to generate administrators/scientists and military academies for naval/ground officers. . .

It would be nice in SM mode to be able to adjust Scientists ... I have an RP concept and it requires a singular Scientist as part of the concept.  Very time consuming to roll up one that looks like what I would like to see.

Yes of course I know it  just I think that scientists should be linked to some other factor as the form of govern or something else that you can control and not just simply randomize.