With ships and colonies more expensive in 0.9.1a, while scaling has not been touched, it is easy for the player to fall behind. I need to use cheese (like edge-camping, Reaper Afflictor abuse) to win those lopsided fights. I think 0.9.1a is the first release where normal scaling (from bounty kills) is too fast, due to increased expenses to prolong the early and mid game.
Similarly, game shoves ten capital spam death fleets at player, while peak performance remained the same at 0.6a when the biggest endgame fleet at the time with HSDF or lone 200k bounty equivalent. PPT was to stop endless kiting (back when enemy AI was aggressive and rarely kited at the time, instead of playing coward since 0.8a) and prevent a single player controlled Hyperion or Tempest from soloing an entire fleet, not burn-out cruisers and even capitals half way through an endgame fight! Such huge endgame fights are highly sensitive to map size, and given how big fights get, nothing less than 500 map size is sufficient. If fights stay this big, with capital spam and all, not only PPT needs to be raised for all, but also maximum map size raised so that player can deploy more than a few big ships.
Also, I delay building most industries until nearly the very end thanks to punishing expeditions. Most of the fun of colony building is more like a reward for winning the game, not part of game progression, at least not if you do not want to see your colonies burned down.