The balancing of this quest is a bit off imho.

I have a game where the whole hero requritment has been disabled for about 150 turns now, reason being that the AI does not give a **** about completing this quest, and the missing systems are in the other corner of the galaxy.

With the acadamy, market, and the whole stuff designed to feed into hero game-play (reduced hire-cost, laws for hero XP, etc) I find it such a waste that this stupid quest is always blocking the whole hero-recruitment feature for prolonged durations of time. It is not the first time I noticed. Basically every game we play (2humans, 6 AI) stalls when that quests get going (in terms of hero recruitment) and often times we have a winner even before this quest line is completed, as it takes (imho) way to long for a hero to claim a system for his/her side.

Just my 2cent

Completely agree.  This final quest line is very tedious. If they don't entirely rework it, they should at least reduce the number of systems by around a third. Also, because it takes so long to do and the systems are so spread out, while the AI starts out attempting it, their heroes inevitably die (at least I suspect this is what's going on) and of course are never healed, so the player is left to go to the edges of the galaxy alone to complete this.

There are other frustrating things. Why can fleets without heroes stop the team progress in the final battle? This just makes no sense, and the quest already puts barriers in front of the player that can mean war in order to complete it (like potentially closed borders). A quest that already takes far too long can be blocked by a fleet without the ability to take the objective for their own team, which just adds to the frustration.

I've never read a positive opinion about this quest, are you looking at changing this Amplitude?