You are over simplifying things a bit...  Elemental uses some sort of high-water system.  The cost of everything declines compared to your highest tech researched.  As such, you can drive down one tech tree a few levels and the other techs will be cheaper to learn.  I am not sure if it is more efficient to do this, but knocking out fast techs generally comes from trees that you have neglected.

Anyhow, why being advanced in spell research makes domination research easier is a bit of question...

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This is what I mean.  I think that 1st level tech is fine, 1st level spells should be cheaper to research, but that higher level costs should be on an increasing curve, not linear.  Say Level 2 is 3x, Level 3 is 6x, level 4 is 10x, and Level 5 is 15x, or some similar progression.

It feels like research is balanced toward the mid-late game instead of early on. It feels wonky, to me at least, because I get brought up short by bugs and other stuff when I only have two cities, and that's the farthest I make it in most of these beta builds. When you have 4 cities and one is completely specialized to research, with a couple nodes to help it out, I'm pretty sure it balances out to normalcy. In the beginning though research is tediously slow.

Yes.

Just so you all know, the variables to modify the linear and nonlinear components of research cost increases are in the ElementalDefs.xml file. Customizing research cost increases is trivial.

I think you are right. If the research production of the player increases at the same rate as the technology it should take roughly 10 turns to research a technology, as in most other games, but only if the technologies are balanced and not overpowered (late game armor compared to early game weapons or spells like Curgens Inferno).

I think the main issue is you'll finish all spells in 1/4th of the time it takes to finish all the research. I think they're simply trying to balance out the time on both these things so that it makes for "fun" gameplay.

I think this will improve as they add more spells, that means they can reduce the research time on spells.

In my opinion, a working fix that would work with the current version of the game would be to reduce the time it takes to research spells, but increase the time it takes to research a new spell level ten-fold.

No, I think it is fine the way it is.

I don't know if you had a gold mine or two, but try to build all of those tech and arcane research buildingd while trying to keep and army and equip your sov/champs without a gold mine. 

I always seem to run into money problems, and there is a balance, you can load up on tech, and sacrifice troops and equip for sov/champs or vice versa.

I think the balance is fine.  For me anyway, it seems about level 5-8 or so, it starts to take me 15-25 turns for a tech.  I also usually wait though a bit on the diplomacy after caravans and the adventure techs, trying to get housing up, food up, money up while weapons as well.

Yeah, I have the 'fast games' setting.  That way, I can figure out the various elements in the game sooner.  Playtesting and all that...

Plus, even at 'fast', the game still takes a while...

A little off topic, but I think it would be absolutely cool to have a GalCivII style race creation interface!

For those who have never seen that.  You get race creation points (like we have now), but you spend some of those points on tech trees, not just 'cool abilities'.  So, for example, if you wanted to have 'Shard Harvesting', you'd just pay some points and get that tech.  And, if you wanted multiple techs down the same tree, you could do so, but they cost more as you worked down the tree.

Oh, and you could select multiple levels for the bonuses for more points (say +2 to speed instead of +1, +15% to tech instead of +10%, etc).

There were a few other things (defensive bonus for your units, better sight range, etc.).  We have a few now, but there were a LOT of options in GalCivII!  Thanks for reminding me about that guys, now I want those plethora of choices here!

Maybe we'll see that in an expansion...

I got sick of it on fast, you can chose where to take advantage and steam roll the AI..