Response from Eric Wrobel and Zak Robinson about Update 8324

Point is, is that you cannot, factually, say that it is a bug anymore than I can, factually, say that it is just an inaccurate or unclear tooltip. Until there is official confirmation, then it is all speculation.

How it worked before the patch also doesn’t make it any more or less confirmed. Town Centers did not allow you to manually target before the patch, either. There was no mention in the patch notes or any other official source of it being changed, but that was confirmed in a stream as being an intentional change. Like I said, we cannot reliably or verifiably say one way or another. Speculation.

EDIT: And, actually…here is a post from November 1st, as well as a game guide from October 27th, that also state that it did affect technology research time, long before the patch. So, I don’t think the claim that it didn’t work this way before the patch is entirely accurate.