I like this system best, at least as a production race. It makes sense that to maximize population growth, you want to store production in as few turns as possible because the rest of the time they can do housing. But you also would like to be able to build your research labs, auto factories, etc on all your colonies as soon as you get the technology.option 2 would be alex's queue system except the way it works is:
say you have 5 planets in your system, you tech on your main home planet, then you house on 3 planets, and you use 2-4 people quick build marine barracks upto 1 turn left on 5th planet, then quit building and switch to housing, and move to next colony in system and repeat saving production with marine barracks.
So in my mind, the optimal solution is to store just enough production on each colony so you can build or buy all of them the turn after you finish researching the tech. It doesn't necessarily have to be one at a time, as long as each colony is storing production for as few turns as possible. And the closer the storing happens to the time you get the tech, the better, since housing for more population earlier is better. This is my line of thinking anyway.
As you point out, sometimes you won't have enough time to store production on every colony before you finish researching the tech. I guess in this case you want to store on as many colonies as you can beforehand.
Side note - would the mass build system be more effective than the queue systems if you have +growth?