Fair enough. I suspect that this becomes obvious slightly later in the story. The way that the first season is presented on Netflix, there's really a bicameral

Fair enough. I suspect that this becomes obvious slightly later in the story. The way that the first season is presented on Netflix, there's really a bicameral distribution of possibilities here -- either the Sophons successfully suppress human tech development and the San Ti have no issue doing whatever they want even without realtime information due to technical edge, or they fail and no matter how much information the San Ti have it won't overcome the tech deficit. I'm sure that for story purposes exploring that negligibly small middle part of the distribution where tech levels are comparable at meeting time is most interesting, but as presented it doesn't feel like the San Ti's probability of success changes enough with FTL communication to suggest that they would take different actions in a universe where everything is the same except FTL comms are prohibited.