P.P.S: also I find it ridiculous that you need to waste 10+ (!) points to research some bandit or worker and you need only 4 points to research some gun. I think it must be vice versa because my jail is always full of these guys and I dont have enough researchers to waste time on them to get their very, very useful knowledge about Dark Dominion or some other things like "#059 Sometimes it is easier to just haul treasure into your craft and call it a day".
Powergaming-wise, it's unintuitive but the pinups are the best researches you can get early game. Each #XXX research is 250 infamy, or ~80k at the end of the month, which really adds up. Even if you wanted research instead of money you could use the extra booty to buy more brainers. In practice ransoming/gambling tends to be better if you need pure money, but it really pays to research everyone once since then you get the infamy for researching that person, the ability to rob, infamy bonus for capturing instead of losing infamy, and a stab at one of those juicy informational researches. Quite a lot for one research
Multiple researches on the same captive type, though.. that's a luxury when you have run out of things you really need.
Additionally, most people just spread brainers out so there's no more than 2 to a project anyways. There aren't many extremely important things to beeline after february unless you get a sudden bottleneck opened up like a workshop.