Your time estimate of 1 hour is very accurate!
I enjoyed this - when we played it I think we missed the strategy around placing the search tokens (or whatever they were called) until it was too late - so I spent much of the late game taking research for 3 points then picking my research card back up.
It felt like maybe there was an issue where it was pretty optimal to put down a token and then dig it up on the next turn - and nobody else can move and dig quickly enough to stop that. But if we were using those tokens more strategically that might be less of an issue.
The tabletop sim mod could do with a little work (correct hands for the player colours, hidden areas for use during setup, maybe a bag with the tiles in to randomly distribute them, etc.) but great job getting this together as it made it much easier for us to play :)
The design of the game is great - everything looks cohesive and it's attractive to look at.
There's a few kind of vague bits in the rulebook - the main one i remember are the rule about digging in your own site (which makes it sound like maybe you need the cards to dig in anybody's site) but in
general it's clear.
Nobody did research from someone else's hand in our game - what do you see the purpose of that being?
Maybe some of it could be streamlined - it feels like there's quite a big rules explanation for phase 1 when actually there's not so many things to do there - so that could be looked at. Once we got it though it moved very quickly and we enjoyed it.
Great job :)