At a certain point, I got to the point where I had run out of CRUST's research bonus, but hadn't yet researched social research. This led to me basically not being able to complete anything with social research requirements, and because it was still early enough into the game were income was low, I ended up having to make the decision of playing passively for an hour to get enough stuff to export to get the money for a private research base, or just quit.
Honestly, I just quit. If a game becomes a slog in the first few hours due to no fault of my own, then I'm not going to stick with it. Just like the event came up where some corp was willing to help me for a favor in the future, it'd be neat that if you hit low cash or low research, you get an offer for more with a loan or some sort of pay back. This game is neat for the exploration and automation. It shouldn't be getting me stuck research just because I didn't follow a certain path in a certain amount of time.