@Chocossimo might be able to tell us...

"Your Councilors made this choice for you" is also used when a quest stage is shared between several branches of the main quest, but the decision you took in the previous step of the quest pre-determines your decision for this step. It's possible that this also occurs if the galaxy settings preclude the other options, but I have not checked specifically for that.

Since this is your home system, this could be the result of mining probes. The FIDSI that the proves harvest is applied per population, not on system. That would also explain why the bonus isn't +2 across the board, but +5 for Food and +3 for Industry.

If they are your allies, then this is indeed odd. Do you still have a save of this?

The two places Salterius pointed out match up with where the trade screen switches from "functional trade route" (the solid lines) to "blocked trade route" (the dashed lines), so those may indeed be the culprits.

As far as I recall, there's a minimum number of representatives in the Home System of 4.

Apart from the broadside versus turret distinction, the placement of the guns does not matter, nor does the hull.

The Diplomatic Pressure does indeed refer to peacetime relations. You can increase this pressure by having a higher score than them, and through "border friction" in your favor. For most faction this means producing a lot of influene in border systems so thay your bubble pushes out the enemy's, but for Unfallen this means creating vines in their systems.

Sadly no, the display has not been changed.

dragontyron wrote:

I also have no idea what actually triggers traces to start to begin with. Well-developed systems obviously do it more often, but there have been times where a system just... completely fails to detect my hacking, even though it had previously detected it on the very first turn it reached the target.

Traces are started by defensive programs. Of course, the AI is more keen to protect well-developed systems than extreme outliers. However, in general you should try to place your own defenses ahead of the actual valuable targets, so you start tracing before the enemy even reaches the system they want to hack.

Furthermore, as far as I know system development has no bearing on trace speed, as both Hack Speed and Trace Speed are empire-wide (with the exception of programs modifying the hacks), but well-developed systems take longer to hack, given the trace more time to succeed.