I also have 5% survey and that gives me a MUCH better feeling for the vastness of space... I have about 30-40 geo and grav survey vessels that roam around doing their thing. Deployment times have been around 3-6 years roughly depending on design.

But then again I don't rush through the game all that much and I don't mind some micromanagement. I do wish there were a few better conditional orders and conditions to help out though so survey ships could be more or less completely automated. There should be an order like "Refuel, Resupply and Overhaul" for example and conditions like if you exceeded deployment or say 80% of a ships designed maintenance life expectancy. That would make it much easier to automate your survey vessels if you want to do that. To be honest I don't understand why there already are no conditional order of "Refuel and Resupply" as it is. If you do one you might as well do the other while you are in port anyway. I also think that the Overhaul order should ALWAYS try to also refuel and resupply a ship if possible at then end of any Overhaul, there should rather be an order that perhaps don't do that rather than do.

Right now I just allow my ship to go until I get a deployment overextended message, then I just send the ship to the nearest maintenance facility to refuel, resupply and overhaul. It takes a few seconds per ship. As they are designed to be in space for a long time they will never need to get back to refuel or resupply within that time anyway.

I'm using carriers with fighter-sized crafts for surveys.
In the beginning most of the micro came from me needing to learn the new narval interface and messing up in the process.

Mine, in the contrary, are squads of 1000-ton cutters with 3-year deployment.
They are more effective, especially with asteroid fields.

More effective at cost of higher micro, which was the previous poster's concern, and reason I didn't go that route as well.

I gave mine a decade's endurance, on 5% survey speed, and it was enough that they'd roam through a system or two each before they'd have to come back in.  Later on, with phased array survey sensors, they could plow through 5 or 6 systems solo in that same time span.

Made them 10,000 tons initially, shrank as tech improved, one of each sensor, own jump drive as soon as it could be made to fit within 10,000 tons.  Send them to a system, and forget they exist for a few years of game time.

Another thing is that if you want to play a more modern unified Earth with say 5-8 billion people or something you can do that now as you can reduce both terraforming, research and survey to very low ratings. This also make researcher admin ratings really matter as you will have allot of labs and will need lots of researchers.

I would like to have a global production value as well but you can make it work if you really want to.

Yep, with default pop and research rate all those techs of 1-3 tiers are nothing, no need to have them in the game mechanics at all.
My usual start of campaign - is 50-100m pop and now, with new options in C# version - 10-25% research, survey and terraforming rates.
With this, I feel that every decision is important, every good specialist is important, and that is history I made, not only a story.

alright you guys have convinced me, next campaign will be 20% research and even less survey. I will start conventional though, and go into magneto plasma, because otherwise I just cant get a feel for what a decent ship feels like. also main guns will be plasma. I have been having lots of fun using plasma, makes your ground units good much faster.

it is not a loss
it is an interesting game
now you have challenge and good motivation to play