So I've been rather annoyed for awhile now that when I'm playing I often get tech rewards from ruins (so they cannot be aborted) that are highly situational or completely useless on the map I'm playing on (bonuses from sea/river when there is next to no sea and few rivers, etc). This wouldn't be such an issue except that with the exception of a few techs (tier 3 strategic resource techs and perhaps a few others that don't normally show up in the research tree) getting these techs increases the cost of all future techs (major issue) and progresses you further towards the next era (not a problem for single-player but kind of a large bonus in multiplayer).

Looking at the code I think I see how to remove particular techs from the droplist which is great, it lets me fix the issue I've run into but I would like to do a bit more. What I really want to do is make it so that tech rewards don't count against the cost of future tech and don't count towards progression for the next era, (i.e. make it so that you just have access to the tech for free).
So the reason for this thread is I'm at a bit of a lost as to how to do that and I'm looking for suggestions.

What I've found so far:

Editing droplists shouldn't be too bad as I said: Public/Quests/Droplists/ then dig around in those files for a bit to find the specific lines that need to be edited and probably dig around in tech tree files for a bit to find the names of the techs that I consider very situational.

My best guess right now for the other part I want to do is: Public/Simulation/SimulationDescription[Technology]
As I believe this is the file that tells the game to count tech research towards meeting the next era and tech costs are based off of that. That said it's not obvious how to change this without making it so techs just don't count towards advancing eras period. I would be someone inclined to think this might not be possible were it not for the fact that I've seen techs in another mod (Hidden Alloy) that are researchable, count towards era progression/tech cost when researched but don't count when gotten as quest rewards.

Anyways, any feedback regarding whether I'm looking at the right places, is this something worth trying, etc would be appreciated. I'm not an experienced modder by any stretch of the imagination but have done a little for some other games and am eager to try to pick it up for this game.