I think Kael pretty much rebalanced all the early tech and building costs so that it takes much longer to accomplish anything which is why FFH seems slower than Vanilla. In Vanilla, beginning techs cost around 40 to 60 beakers, FFH more than doubled the starting tech costs and you only get one tech (or none!) instead of two like in Vanilla. I guess you could try the editor to manually lower the costs by a factor to speed up the game.