I personaly don't like tech victories.

This bug saved my civ in my first TA game, playing as Krynn and with Terrans making my life difficult after a rather bitter war. With original plan of tech-escape gone thanks to the Knife auto-ascending, traded with them for Black Hole Eruptors and managed to hold Terrans in a war-tech stalemate with my fewer-but-shootier ships long enough to get an influence victory. Knife didn't disappear though, at least not until the Terrans and I carved them up (got all my worlds back, but Terrans took the lion's share and thus had a few juicy techs of their own, though thankfully not guns).

In terms of "deliberately unbalancing the game" though, I'd soon like to see the back of it, the regular whack-a-Knife are irritating enough (in a fun, "give me back my xinathium hull plating or else" kind of way) without closing down one of the victory routes.