So, does it boil down to the fact that research times for creatures are too long? (Cultists should be fine, they're cheap.)
I think so. After 3-4 months of playing, I had enough "backlog" projects to research for the rest of the year. Creatures that I captured on the first battle, I could only study 6 months later.
From looking at the 0.2 ruleset, a single scientist (20% of your brain power for the first three months) performing an autopsy takes from 0.3 months to 6 months; studying a live specimen takes 3 months. Actually, even studying a captured baseball bat takes 10 days to write a report "It's a stick. You hit people with it.".
Note, in Openxcom, the more scientists you put on a project, the more you waste when the total is reached and exceeded (ex: 10 scientists, a random 0-9 are wasted, average 4.5) This is the
opposite of vanilla, where the entire team will work "a second time for free" when it's reassigned. If the research seems to be a bottleneck, it really entices to split the research, in order to spare a man-day here and there.
By the way, I found the magnum sprite jarring, compared to the other contemporary weapons, so I tried a different drawing, inspired by the snub-nose pistol.