I disagree that the AI govs are outright 'bad'. I feel that they're pretty good at building out planets, all things considered. When they were overhauled, it marked a huge improvement over what they were when the game had launched. There certainly are caveats to what I have stated, and there is definitely lots of room for improvement, particularly regarding how the AI utilizes unique, or culture buildings as well as building placement. 

The power graph is definitely broken. The Yor were terrifyingly ahead on the graph, declared war on the apparently inferior (but technologically ahead so less is more and all that ) Torians, and were swiftly left crippled.

Of course the Torians, then the Terrans pounded on the Yor for a bit but... didn't actually grab any planets. Meanwhile I nabbed 4 despite having nowhere near the ability to have taken anything from the Yor without the AI's hamfisted attempt to wage a war against them leaving them crippled.

But yeah that leads to the bigger problem, having obtained total dominance over another AI... they didn't make any meaningful inroads. I've had another game when the Terrans were totally cleaned out by the Altarians like literally 0 ships and shipyards left and then suddenly they made peace... Ofc I just helped myself lol.

So most recent two games on Incredible, this last one particularly when I had a terrible start but I just play on anyway because why nots lol, the AI gifted me a shot at victory by cleaning someone out that they should have nabbed for themselves really.

It's easier to criticize an ai system than it is to improve it or even  too give the details needed to see what/how/why an ai is coming to a poor decision.  Brad/Frogboy had a blogpost somewhere lonnng ago that went into detail on it, but I can't seem to find it.  

at a minimum, the folks at stardock need enough information to see specifically what it's doing to cause your disgruntled feelings... it is likely to be incredibly helpful if you can also show what lead up to the wonkyness itself.  here are a number of things you can do to help:

• if you are seeing something that consistently seems screwy, save the game where it's happening & upload it to dropbox or something with a link in your post describing what is funky in as much detail as you can.
• if you get in the habit of saving games with names like [mercs race game x turn xxx], you can easily pull out a bunch of gamestate snapshots that show how things were along the way.
• more importantly in some cases, they will also give a way where adjustments & alterations in whatever caused the issue to be tested against the actual screwy situation

There are a lot of things since beta that were addressed following those sorts of details & provided foundation.