Quiet, you. You're giving away all of our robot secrets.

but yes, I think these should be off limits to synthetic races.

Yep I always take the max negatives in food and growth when making a custom synthetic race.  Some people might think of it as a "cheat" of sorts, but I think it actually works out fine.  It seems to me an artificial life form should be able to have many more advantages over much more fragile squishy biological life forms, for the trade off that the synthetics have to divert their production abilities into growing their population.  I think this actually works out fine in the context of the game, and isn't unbalancing as it is currently set up.  Some people may disagree with my perspective on it.  I hope the devs don't decide to "nerf" this "cheat" that synthetics can currently use, since even with this minor "cheat" I think other racial traits are currently better than synthetics anyways.  Of course I have only tried out synthetics once since Crusade launched, and that was within the first few days.  Everything was so horrendously buggy at that point that the game was pretty much unplayable anyways.  Perhaps if I tried playing a synthetic race now that everything is running pretty smooth, I might think that the food and growth cheats are too overpowering (but I doubt it).