Neat Idea, Hobbes!! 
(Have you checked out HellRaiser's research mod that he has been working on in the past week?)
Just read it. He has some nice ideas about those UFO components that have no utility but others are impracticable with the tree I'm designing, specially his requirements for the Alien Containment. I've also looked already into the Tiny Research Mod and the Alternate Weapon Tech and got a few elements from both.
To reveal the main change I've introduced, the research tree I've designed has 8 techs (7 new, 1 existing one) that are required for the advanced projects (weapons, UFOs, Psionics, etc.) and can only be unlocked by capturing aliens. And to help with this requirement, there is a new alien rank of Scientist, which when interrogated will randomly give 1 of these techs. And other ranks can also randomly give a few of these techs (e.g. Alien Engineer can unlock Plasma Weapons).
One of the things that annoyed me in the original game was how easy it was for Earth to develop Plasma Weapons or UFOs. With these requirements at least you'll need the *active* collaboration of an alien to get those techs.
And there's also minor additions, such as Heavy Laser + Elerium unlocking Advanced Heavy Laser (which uses XComUtil's stats).
Mods to include:
- Combat Knife (the ability to add melee kills is a great little expansion of the game)
- Incendiary grenade (nice tool, not game breaking)
Game feature improvement:
- Better handobs. i.e. Medikit, HE Pack, Motion Scanner, etc. These all use the default grenade handob, and it just looks silly. I have already created a Medikit handob mod, and will post an HE Pack handob mod this evening. Motion scanner to be worked on soon as well.
Already got all 3 on my personal list. I will add the HE Pack and Scanner Handobs to the list when you add them.
Overall, I think that the items that are added into the mod shouldn't fundamentally change the game or unbalance it. I know that this can be very tricky, (i.e. Sniper Rifle can dominate early game, etc) but I think the effort is worth it.
Unless the item fills a specific niche (like Incendiary Grenade), it's unlikely that I'll add it to the XCom standard equipment, if it's just a variation of the original equipment (Sniper Rifles, Shotguns, Machineguns, RPGs would fit this description). However, I'll be adding additional human factions and there's plenty of room there for alternative gear that could be later be recovered and used by XCom.
Thanks!
i am not sure if this will help you but... i will give a try :-)
in my fork https://github.com/Bladum/OpenXcom i merged several different improvements from other devs (guys you are awesome !!) and try to keep code similar to vanilla to still get fixes from standard.
I have two main rules about this fork:
1) fork that supports a community edition with single mod that is non configurable. This means all players have similar experience. There is no need to maintain vanilla compatibility or other mods compatibility. Mod that is using all new features is already inside the repo, actually if you look into resources it has completely "singleton" structure.
2) i do not judge if feature is vanilla or not neither if this is needed or not nor do i like it or not. I just judge how much time it will take or if it will break any standard inside code for any future growth. So if you have any requests which are not breaking the game from technical point of view, then i am glad to add them. I do not care if there are 10 or 100 aliens unless performance drops a lot.
If you think this will help you in achieving your goal then lets talk about it.
If not just ignore my post.... and sorry for wasting a minute for reading this 
Tom
I'd love to use a specialized build to change things like alien mission frequency buuuuuut going that route would complicate things for players. At this point that isn't on the plans since I already come up with temporary solutions for a couple of issues but thanks for the offer
