Yup. Progress is happening. It's pretty weird to think that I wrote the first post of this thread a bit over a year ago.
Food distribution seems to be working well. People get fed in the order of farmers->workers->unemployed. Newly colonized regions grow quite happily up to the amount of food produced.
I do foresee something interesting. Once I implement unemployed pops automatically migrating to uncolonized regions, the initial growth boom is going to be self-perpetuating until every arable region on the planet is colonized. Sending just a seed population of 1 to a planet should cause it to start spreading over the planet at an exponential rate before finally collapsing when the boom finally ends. Afterwards the population will fall down to the level of food production. Interestingly, since the population will be relatively stable after that point, if you were to somehow prevent the initial population boom and keep a stable supply of food, you could colonize the planet at a far more controlled rate. Yay, player interaction!
After pressing the End Turn button a couple of times I have noticed that an average sized region(which is annoyingly 11 nodes) surpasses the amount of jobs it has by default at the 32 turn mark. Might have to tweak growth so it's faster in the initial stages, but that's something for later.