Well here is what I have.
1) There are people who use this mod as a scenario so that they can do just what you say. As far as I know the only side effect is that the science advisor screen comes out a little hard to read.
2) I call the governments balanced. We haven't received much feedback in this area, so we are assuming that to mean all is well with them.
3) There are a few new ones as well. The main problem with adding more governments is the inability to differentiate them. We have added Fascism, City State, and Theocracy. We have also moved the other goverments around some and made some changes to those. Added factions...in the future we would like to add this, as far as I know now there is a problem with adding them. There are new resources, albeit not many. A problem with these is the way the program handles the icons from the PCX file, so we had to limit how many we added to the game.
One of our biggest goals is to make the game more interesting, while maintaining the level of balance we have achieved thus far. We are currently working on a new combat model based on the given combat formula. Another area we have been experimenting with is the terrain values. We would like to make those more well defined. If there are any other questions we can answer for you, please ask away.