This time I ponder about what 
Game start
I find the universe badly coded and optimised if life was the developer's intentions
Did you know steemit is an experiment? It is true. We're all somebody's lab rats running along a maze. Do you know what is steemit's point? You don't. You could guess, but by no means you could claim you're close to guessing right. Likewise, you could only guess what our universe's devs are trying to accomplish.
Are they testing life? I wouldn't guess so. I assume they have the recipe for that already. Life under specific restraints, maybe. It could be something else indirectly related to living organisms, but not even life itself. Hell, they could be merely testing the interface for their next gen AAA title. Or a new editor interface for a universe-photoshop program.
And why so much time after?
In Minecraft, you start playing when the world is already shaped. The coder behind the game made the generation algorithm. As a player, you don't see stuff being created, you just pop in when it's ready for you.
While it is possible to look at the code and deconstruct it, the avatar controlled by the player does not have access to it. That avatar also doesn't witness creation itself. But Minecraft's entertainment purpose goes hand in hand with this.
Why have so many civilizations popped up before he even decided to give himself an avatar?
In a Civilization game, each player controls a civilization. If there are less players than there are civilizations, those without player influence remain automated.
If our universe is not a game, but a research project, it happens this way because it is what they want to do. The data they're after can only occur under this set of circumstances. It would be pointless to waste computing power with anything that is completely useless while seeking empirical evidence for something specific.
because it would be like the developer's self insert in his own simulation game
That's what I suggest. Either the dev himself or one of the application's testes/end users.
Thank you for reading!