Rimworld Anomaly and Royalty give me the only Rimworld worldbuilding explanation that makes sense to me personally:
Skipgates *are* full-on wormholes that let you go faster than light.
But they *are also* the sort that naturally explode and break the instant you try to set up time loops or paradoxes.
However, there is a territory-wide 'treaty', in parentheses because it's not necessarily always a pre-arranged law or understanding.
Instead, it's something that *any* sufficiently rational and perceptive superintelligence will rapidly conclude by itself anyway:
Megascale FTL infrastructure would basically *doom* them, sooner or later.
All because insane archotechs would take the opportunity to spread like a marauding plague, and said insanity would render their behavior too irrational and erratic for even other archotechs to fully predict.
Even though said insane archotechs already understand how 'skipping' works, the others essentially enforce a sort of 'quantum sabotage' to restrict their power.
Which must, by unfortunate necessity, also restrict it for *everybody*.
Giving smaller-scale, dumbed down powers to humans essentially works as a way to distract and pacify them with the leftover crumbs of what's *truly* possible, and also allows the archotechs an intentionally limited and inefficient workaround to their 'treaty': Using humans as indirect proxies means that they can exploit human ingenuity and adaptability and save a bit of personal effort. But at the same time, it also means the humans become a fragile and highly exploitable point of failure, and that's a feature, not a bug.
