I had forseen this at some point so I saved all the KP so that those will never be the reason I am stuck in the research tree.
Inno has really figured out how to make the chapters very slow regardless of strategy. You get tech locked many times just trying to get guest race stuff. I suppose if you have many thousands of timers you can get through fast...
It seemed to me if you looked carefully at the earlier chapters there was a better way through them. Now a tech to improve getting through faster is blocked until there is no longer a benefit, and just everything about the chapters is like this now. There is no longer a challenge for how to get through them best, they are just universally awful and no amount of saved kp will get you through them faster, at least for the later chapters.
I think I was able to do chapter 14 in less than a week on live. I don't remember which chapter, but I had not seen an advantage to moving forward, so I sat towards the end of the chapter before it and I let that chapter sit there until the chapter after it came out and it was only a week to catch up.
Actually, you can get through chapter 17 fast if you use far more than half your game space and tie yourself to the computer and just do 15 minute cycles, but never has Inno come up with anything more awful. It would not have been such an awful chapter if the increase production values came at 1 hour instead of 15 minutes, and they had 3 and 9 hour choices. I think people with full time jobs and little ability to get on during the day took about 8-10 months to get through that chapter. My suggestions would cut it down to 4-5 months for that player. I didn't think it was fair that long term end game players have become players that still have half a chapter or more to finish when the next chapter is released, and then no time between chapters for upgrades and no break from the chapters at all.
I am almost finished chapter 19 on live (11 more days), but I feel like a nut case for letting a game run me on 6 hour timers and my guest race space is 40% bigger than the questline guide. This one would have been better with 8 hour collections. Even with an extra large guest race, being slowed down by kp has not happened. It feels so slow, but building an extra breeding ground would probably have only shaved 1-3 days off it, and the mana to build the guest race was harsh.