Although, I'd still advocate for a +5 secs of pre-battle time with the observatory.. this -10% is very meh.
Well, now that it's so much cheaper, and since 14 guild members had already built one, I'm recommending we use it. And we are. 24x7. It's not great, but on 10-24 hour trips, it's better than nothing. I plan to keep complaining about it until the two things I mentioned are fixed, though.
BP to fund observatory is terrible. This complaint has been in the forums so much. They could fix it if every time you sent your ship out to battle any boat or creature it yielded BP. That alone would help a lot! There's other ways but that alone would be huge.