Never mind the above, i finally figured it all out after gobbling a tall cup of coffee this morning!
Once more i'm ashamed of even trying to bother anyone with such an "obvious" thing... must be my wacky brain acted up again.
Have a good look at the following tricky SandBox save with a couple of key items in the tech sections which blasted thunderous thoughts to my thick skull after performing a few purposely efficient faked game defeats and compares of...
(TechTree)0|1|2|3|4|6|7|11|*53*|
206|207|209|210|211|*212*|217|218|*219*|
240|249|250|251|252|253|254|255|256|257|258|259|264|265|266|(/TechTree)
That's all it took!!
If #53 was indeed Xeno-Engineering and #219 just so happened to be Star Federation, it made a whole bunch of sense that #212 could very well be Galactic Understanding too. Re-loaded, Ctrl-M'ed the preqs of the Research path towards IT, destroyed the only test but useless Homeworld, lapsed the final turn: DEFEAT screen. Done.
Pouf -- Two-Hundred-and-Twelve right THERE for me to stare at.
Fired up a small xml reader prog... pin-pointed at the 212th line in the TechTree file... THERE it was also, the bitchy mysterious & mythical tag, in all its glory.

I yelled screaming outloud in my lonely room; No way, it was ---THAT--- much simple!
The darn sequence typed straight in the file itself provides the exact numbers for those tech_IDs as they should.
First to last.
Chew on that gum, stupid and blow it as pink glue.
#0? well... somethin's gotta start at a dimensioned array loop as usual.
Duh-
Sorry, everybody.
And, if you should want to know; Colonizers are all between #249 and #259, #1 is still Interstellar Gov and #272 always was Quantum Power Plants.
Now it's about time to get right back to GTeChnos for DA **and** Twilight.
...