I really like the new planetary management/pop system, much more interesting to specialise your planets now, and it’s also great that pop growth now isn’t proportional to the number of planets you have… It’s a major shame about the lack of optimisation and the bugs, though. My biggest hope for this update was a performance boost so fingers crossed they’re still gonna deliver on that!
Also, I’ve seen a lot of UI complaints, especially around the planetary management. It definitely had issues on launch but I’ve not found it unplayably bad like some others? Definitely could display more info but not disastrously bad
Pretty sure there’s an “AI aggressiveness” slider when you’re starting a new game, have you tried fiddling with that? Also you could make a custom start and put only empires with peaceful ethics in your game.