[@Vulkan]

I haven't seen any claims that the Hegemony is lacking technologically, and they even have some of their own armor/weapon designs on the market in the citadel, and I don't recall anything similar from the Hanar, Elcor, or Drell. They're just insular, tyranically so, citizens aren't allowed to leave and everything is censored, meaning the majority of Batarians we meet are outlaws, pirates, slavers, generally just rule-breakers, or they're Hegemony agents or spokesmen- sometimes they're both. I'm not claiming they're actually good and decent brainiacs behind their wall of censorship, but I don't think it's fair to depict an entire species at the epitome of evil and ineptitude as Bioware have done either.

That said, the Academy [i]is[/i] a very exclusive private upper caste school :P, not exactly a standard representation of what the Hegemony makes available to everyone, and the staff went like two whole years without discovering one of their slaves had a baby, and have you ever tried to hide a baby? I haven't, because those things be loud and smelly and needy, iow; difficult to hide.

I get what you mean though, I make no assumptions that Cicero's education will be nearly as good as someone from one of the Council species. All that censorship, xenophobia, and isolationism would definitely have left him at a handicap education-wise, but he's had two years in the Terminus to beef up his repertoire with some on hands experience working with xeno-biology and the free extranet, so hopefully that's good enough to compensate! 

And ye, I missed the personality addition but I'll edit it now. o7