I couldn't agree more. In defense of the way things stand, however, you're not quite as blind as it first seems. When the parenthesis text indictates your high diplomacy is giving you an advantage, then you're almost certainly getting better than 1:1 beakers for beakers in tech. Granted, this is modified by certain things (apparently the AI values weapons techs more, and god only knows how it values money, ships, influence, etc when converting to tech points), but the *programmers* consider whatever deal emerges to be advantageous to you.
Of course, knowing you're getting a bargain is different from being able to quantify it, which you'd think would be easy to display (when right clicking the techs, say). It's all the worse since each race will make different deals that are of different advantages to you. The same tech that'll get 200 bc from one race will get 300 from another. You can "manually" get a good guess of what a tech is worth by plunking it down in the interface, and seeing how much a race will pay for it. But that's almost infuriating when you consider that all of the math is already there and simply isn't being displayed.
And the interface is sorely missing a "what'll it take to make this deal work" button that'll add the cash difference between techs automatically without me having to screw with the tech slider each time.
