Well, I've got two points on that score:
1) What is your definition of "it's going to take some time"? I'm currently playing my third game of ToA, all of them with Immense galaxies, 7 major opponents and 8 minor races. In all three games, I encountered another major race within 20 turns, with the nearest opponent's colony being with 20 movement points. (Conversely, when I get to the other side of the galaxy many, many turns later, I discover that the area is still largely unsettled. The conclusion, therefore, is that the AI establishes the other racial positions crowding towards the player's position.
2) What's the point of having a Super Ability advantage if you can't/have difficulty using it? If you have a SA that permits you to settle normally uninhabitable planets, but the closest of those are in "enemy territory", what is the effect of exercising that SA? It annoys the opponent, because you're squatting in "his" territory, and places your fledgling colony into an opponent's Influence well. If you Mine any asteroids near those planets, they almost immediately flip to the opposing race that was already established before you moved into the neighborhood. And even with the SA, those normally uninhabitable planets are only 50% productive as a "normal" planet, due to the hostile environment. (Until you finish researching Colonization of that Extreme environment.)
My view of how such a SA should be incorporated is that the galaxy is generated, with planet quality and type randomly dropped onto the map. Then the various racial starting planets are dropped onto that gameboard with a bias towards NOT crowding the players next to each other. The "density" of any given planet type would be about the same, no matter where your start position happens to be.
As it stands, based on a sample of only three games, the _player's_ start position is crowded by the other races. Furthermore, _if_ the player has a Super Ability that involves the ability to colonize normally uninhabitable planets, then those types of planets are either converted to something else or pushed a good distance away from the player's starting world. The net effect is to marginalize the Super Ability and to place him at a disadvantage in regards to the races that start on the other side of the galaxy where things are less crowded.
Both of these game mechanics strike me as being something that would be directly connected to the Difficulty level. (Which, in my case, is "Normal".) If anyone has differing experiences on other Difficulty settings, I wouldn't mind hearing about it. My feeling is that the AI galaxy setup does this the same way across the full spectrum of Difficulty.
