Thanks for bothing with responding Juku, I do realize I have probably already crossed the threshold into rant territory.
Well, then you have two sets of new pals. 
Make sure you take some back home for partying interrogation.
The waspites were easy to kill, but I didn't manage to capture a single one. Thing is, aliens (especially Mutons) are EXTREMELY good shooters. I have folks with accuracy of 120% or something, and yet they often struggle hitting the broad side of a barn with a sniper rifle. Mutons will often one-shot me from across the map with a Plasma Pistol.
But it's a way to alleviate the tedium, the mod being what it is. If you don't want to make life easier for yourself in an attempt to play 'as the creator intended' or whatever your line of reasoning is, that's fine. But I find such an attitude kinda weird when applied to mods and especially mods in the middle of development. Mods are all about altering the game to suit your tastes, and so is changing tedious stuff via various means (save editing, submods, memory manipulation, building your own fork, etc).
You misunderstood me, probably because I didn't spell it out right. What I meant was, while such a solution (editing the savegame) might bring me recourse for now, a mod (in development, as you say) should eventually aim to make such workaround unneccessary. Apart from that, I agree with your reasoning.
Solarius's stance is that not all battles need to be winnable. The Mutons will relent eventually, you will get some captures even if they don't, etc.
Oh, I agree with that not every battle needs to be winnable. I would have an extremely hard time at the Muton base, same thing with large Muton UFOs, they mop the floor with my soldiers. It's just the lack of variety that gets me. After the Waspoids, the next two UFOs were Mutons again. Since my main squads now have at least Laser Rifles, dealing with them is no longer so nightmareish.
There are actually two tiers of plasma research. Right now, your scientists are at the phase of "these be weapons, but damn if we know how to activate them". Kinda makes sense for an interstellar polity to make their weapons not easily accessible. Then you get to use captured weapons, and finally you get to build your own.
(...)
I think your biggest problem is that the mod is predicated on the player getting regular captures, and you failed to do that because Mutons. It's a somewhat rare and mildly interesting scenario.
Yeah, the mod relies on captures - things are far from reliable even with captures, I think I'm now stuck on Delta Radiation and Alien Gravity Generator, both of which you can get from a number of captures, each of which has it in a long list of random topics you might get otherwise.
What really should happen is that you ought to be given longer ranged and more reliable capturing methods. I've had Small Launchers for ages, but you cannot research and thus not use them.
Why is there no stun grenade ammo for the Grenade Launcher, Rocket Launcher, Milkor etc.?
All I have is Knockout Grenades, which do jack shit far too often and are very TU intensive to boot, and Dart Pistols / Rifles, which suck against Mutons (but they might suck against Sectoids, too, due to the energy shields). Thus the strategy I've been employing to get captures at all is to use maximum firepower, and if, as it happens occasionally, even that leaves the opponent injured instead of killed, I try to rush a soldier over and heal him up. Then I leave a guard with a dart pistol in case he wakes up again.
That's a PITA, but the mod is far too unforgiving for anything else. I'm not afraid to reload a save every now and then, but I don't want to savescumm ALL THE TIME.
RNG can be skipped by save editing. When I first played XCF back in 2017 or so, I meticulously made lists of random missions for the month by reloading several times, and then edited in a big combined list to make sure I get a variety of missions every month. Made for more interesting mission sets, but yeah, not something a sane person would do. 
Definately an unconventional strategy.
You would, but this has been the biggest criticism levied against HWPs for nearly three decades.
I might have criticized that myself at some point, and I do enjoy the idea of tanks gaining XP, but I don't really see why nobody just made a code change to allow tanks to gain XP. It's not like we're stuck with XCOM's codebase now with OpenXcom, right?
Besides, the purpose of HWPs in the original game was to have a frontine unit which wasn't so painful if you lost it, and now those alien crystals are FAR MORE RARE than good soldiers, so you can only have an extremely limited number of tanks, and ... what happens if one is destroyed, if the AI lost for good?
