Mix 'n' match special techs

So you basically have your "Mechanical", "Organic", and "Crystalline" techs, right? Mechanical being your basic run of the mill stuff, Organic being the stuff from the Organic racial trait, and Crystalline being the stuff from the Crystallurgy racial trait, right? Those have sort of become like the "paradigms" from Adamant in some mods... well, what if you could mix and match?

Say you divide up the tech tree into X number of "general areas" - say, like so with X=5:

Construction - covers space yards, repair, hull sizes, armor, that sort of thing
Industry - covers resource extraction, spaceports, resupply, etc.
Logistics - covers research, intelligence, ship training, ECM, etc.
Energy - covers reactors, supply storage, engines, beam weapons, etc.
Armaments - covers non-beam weapons (missiles/torpedoes/cannons/etc.)

Now, set up X*3 (in this case 15) basic tech areas off of which other things can branch... one for each possible combination of paradigm and area (such as "mechanical construction" or "organic armaments").

The cool thing now is you can give each combination its own advantages and disadvantages, and players will be free to mix and match, so they're not stuck with one "paradigm" of technology for the entire game as if they'd picked it by a racial trait. Say, organic construction technology might be expensive and slow (YOU try growing a starship! ) but the resulting ships will have regeneration capability and extra hitpoints, perhaps. Organic might not shine so well when it comes to weapons, though - while they may be cheap to research and build, they won't be very powerful, except in the biological weapons category! And crystallurgy would really shine at the energy side of things but to balance that it would be expensive to research!

There would probably have to be a "barrier to entry" for each combination, though (in the form of level 1 of each tech being really expensive or requiring an expensive prerequisite) just so that empires are discouraged from over-diversifying, and if there are no "basic" techs which everyone gets to start with, you wouldn't want to play with 0 tech points to start!

Thoughts?