Lowering the research rate has a different effect on the game than lowering the surveying and/or or terraforming rates.
Most of the cost of your ongoing surveying and terraforming efforts are paid up front, when you build the ships.
After you build them, there is just the cost of moving them around.
For surveyors, since they are military ships, you will also pay some MSP per year, but this point holds:
A very small portion of your economy goes to support the ongoing work of the surveyors and terraformers you have already built.
Lowering the surveying rate means one of two (really three) things will happen:
1) Your surveying of the universe will progress more slowly, or
2) You will build more surveyors so that your surveying will progress at the same speed as before.
3) Or, some medium point between the two--you build more surveyors, but not so many to completely compensate for the lowered surveying rate.
In a game with 100% surveying rate, we don't really need that many surveyors. It takes some time to build the shipyard, and it takes some years to crank out the ships, but in the grand scheme things, we spend a tiny fraction of a percent of our first 20-50 years of economic output on surveying.
In a game with, say, 10% surveying rate, we can pick option number 2 and survey at the same speed as in a game with 100% surveying rate, as long as we spend ten times as much on surveyors.
But we can't really build ten times as many survey ships in the same amount of time--it takes a long time to add slipways.
So really we are paying this extra cost over a much longer time.
In the final analysis, lowering the rate only forces us to continue spending an inconsequential amount to build ships for a much longer time.
Eventually, we will probably survey at the same total speed as before. It will just take longer to reach that point, and we won't much notice the extra cost.
All of this is even more true for terraforming, since orbital terraformers are not military components, which means that your terraforming ships don't have an ongoing MSP cost.
If you are terraforming with installations, you might run out of workers if you must build a lot more, but really you would just switch to orbital terraformers at that point anyway.
Research is different, for two reasons.
For one, the long term cost of performing research is not heavily front-loaded.
When you build a survey/terraforming ship, you have just paid most of the cost of the surveying/atmosphere it will generate. (Again, except for the MSP cost for surveyors, which is about 1/16 the cost of the ship each year.)
But when you build a lab, you have just made a small down payment on the long-term cost of research.
A lab costs 2400 wealth to build.
With starting tech, and with no bonus from the scientist using it, it generates 200 research points per year, which costs us 200 wealth.
The workers using it generate 100 wealth in taxes.
But we are almost always using a scientist with a bonus, and almost always getting the 4x from the specialized field.
And one of the first things we research is Research Rate 240.
So really, we are probably averaging over 360 RP per lab per year fairly early in the game, and getting back 120 or 140 in taxes, plus any governor/sector bonus.
All told, in ten years or so we have probably paid more for the RP the lab has generated than we paid to build the lab.
Then we get Research Rate 320, and our scientists are getting better, so maybe we are averaging 700 RP per year, and the workers make 160 in taxes (plus bonuses).
Now the RP cost exceeds the build cost after 5 years or so.
As the game goes on and our scientists get better and our Research Rate tech improves, the cost of building the lab becomes trivial compared to the cost of the RP it generates. We decide how many labs to build not by how many we can afford to build with the wealth we have, but by how many we can afford to operate with the income we have.
If we play a game with a lowered research rate, we can't just build more labs to make up for it, like we can with survey ships.
We are constrained by the cost of operating the labs.
The other thing that is different with research is that a lab must have a scientist to use it, and a scientist can only operate so many labs at once.
Even if I run out of naval officers, I can still build and operate more surveying ships.
But even if I could afford to operate enough labs to compensate for the reduced research rate, at some point I will run out of scientists.
I can make more academies in order to have more scientists, but this is forcing me to
a) use scientists with lower bonuses, and
b) take longer to finish individual projects.
In other words, the per-scientist limit on lab usage means that reducing the research rate reduces the ROI we get from labs, and increases the amount of time needed to bee-line a given tech field.
TL;DR:
Lowering the research rate has a profound impact throughout the game.
Lowering the rates for surveying and/or terraforming merely extends the ramp-up time for those efforts, without significantly increasing the cost.