Oh wow, I too saw Michael Hendricks 1000x science cost and wanted to try myself. But same as you 1000x was a bit too insane. But I "just" went with 20x as I don't have that much time to play, and wanted to actually be able to complete the game without having to spend years haha.
I actually went with fulgora first, because I wanted to try building a rare quality mall. It half work, but not as good as I had hoped. I have gone to vulcanus also, and made 1k spm for red/green/blue/metallurgy there. And now I'm on gleba trying to unlock t3 prod modules. And then I'll go back to vulcanus and make purple/yellow there also.
Maybe I'll post some screenshots if I remember tomorrow
Other skilling mini games would be