Stellar Manipulation costs

I barely had a few games under my belt of SE IV before deciding to purchase SE V so I'm still pretty new to the whole SE universe. Forgive me if I sound retarded and/or if I am missing something obvious. I've noticed that the tech tree has changed going from SE IV to SE V. However, coming from SE IV it seems that stellar manipulation has been made extraordinarily expensive. Starting at 100000 research points per level and requiring something like 80 levels to acquire all components. In a game I recently quit, I had researched it up to something like level 5 and after spending all those research points the only thing I had to show for it was a level 5 monolith facility. Reading the game manual it plainly states that SM tech costs start at 10000 per level and not 100000. That would make level 80 pretty expensive but still attainable if you wanted to dedicate enough research facilities to the task. However, starting at 100000 and increasing by 100000 per level makes the cost unattainable unless you are willing to play a game that lasts 4000 years. So what is going on here? Am I missing something research related that would make the current 100000 per level cost reasonable or is this a bug/mistake and how do I fix it?