If I get the starship bonus event during the initial colony rush I'll build my manufacturing capital on that world and build most of my warships there. In my last game I got 2 of the events and had 2 shipyards cranking out ships with ~50% bonuses. Add in a couple military resources and it didn't take long for my little fleet to smash everything in its path.

Question - if you get a Starship Bonus from a planet and build a ship, then upgrade that ship in the field, does it retain that bonus?

"What a waste of time!"   

Well, that might explain why anyone would bother to build the Galactic Guide Book.

Perhaps a new, infuriating anomaly - one that either blows up or swallows your ship without a trace. To make it more fair, none of the starting anomalies would do this, to prevent AIs losing their flagships too early to these things.

Anomalies do indeed reappear in 1.8. But they never reach the level of density at which they were at the start of the game, because every time one pops up, all survey-capable AI ships in the galaxy go berserk to grab it, and then go to the next closest in a never-ending race. So unless you have abundant anomalies, I think the Guidebook is still useless. I was running Occasional Anomalies, and 2 manually-controlled 'Seeker'-class armed surveyors were sufficient to outrun the slow-moving AI Flagships to hit anomalies anywhere they popped up, but filled up a secondary role of reconnaissance vessels and transport-hunters during wars. For some reason, autopilot takes ships on erratic flight paths that go straight through asteroid fields as if they don't exist, and this wastes a turn due to ships getting stuck and reduced to 1 movement point.

But, with reappearing anomalies, even the useful 1000 bc anomaly becomes trivial as your economy(and thus, treasury) grows. The top anomaly in late-game has got to be this one: "Our database of info on the current tech has grown by 25%!". When researching very expensive techs, this thing can save several thousand bc in research funds and chop a bit of time off the techs as well.