Instead of making a post I'm rewriting a post nobody ever commented on about underpowered races.
My idea is that I would like to be able to see factions work together to research a tech. Combining research points. They both will be able to get the tech. This is kind of complicated because different factions use different techs. If you don't have advanced espionage then all you coulld suggest are the next techs in line to research on your tech tree. If you have advanced espionage then you could recommend that you research the next tech in either tree. Even if you don't have advanced espionage then the other faction could recommend one of the next techs in it's tech tree to be researched instead. This could be only allowed for two factions, or it could be allowed for whatever multiples wanted to join.
The other idea I borrowed from someone else, and is what inspired the first idea. Is to recommend that a faction research a tech. This would require that you have advanced espionage on the other faction to know what the next tech that he can research.
This would require that either one of the factions have a research treaty on the other, or alliances between races. One or the other or both options the Devs could use. You could add the stipulation that the lowest tech level is what you use or not. Meaning that the game could say that the least advanced guy is what the techs are pulled from meaning that we can't research phasers when all one of us has is particle beams. We can work on lasers though. If the developers had any techs that they don't want people to do this with then these tech trees wouldn't have to include them.
One way I came up with on how the developers could implement this is that they could come up with a generic tech tree with different research paths for this. You would then start researching the techs that haven't been researched by whatever way you are researching. I mean that if two or more factions are researching techs would fill this tree different than if you were asking a faction to research a tech. Only the faction researching the tech would be involved in the tree.
Another option have two generic tech trees one for sharing, and one for when someone wants you to research a tech.
Another option is what I think is the best option is to include the next techs to be researched if sharing this would come from tech trees from all participants, If suggesting it would come from the tech next to be researched in the faction's tech tree to be researched that you are asking to research.
What is almost the above option is you could group the factions together in groups each group would have a default tech tree. When there were two or more of different group factions then the tech trees would combine. If the different factions were in the same group then it would just use the one tech tree. This would make it that you could only research the techs that were in order to be rresearched. This could combine either option one or two where this could be one tech tree for both research sharing or suggesting a research, or you could make two seperate trees for each group.