I developed this same strategy on my own, actually. It's really fun. A tip: Playing it safe can make a single interactive machine (terms, fabs) last forever and give you all that your heart desires. If you disconnect before trace is complete and wait 50 turns you get another shot at it. After the first time you access a machine you can get a new trace going as soon as you reconnect, but you can always wait 50 more turns and try again if that happens. You still can't get the best stuff on -10 because the fabs won't let you make stuff with high rating (above 4 I think), but you can sure download pretty high tier schematics (don't know if there is a limit on this as well).
A burning doubt, tho: Footprint analyzers? What do they DO exactly??? From the description it will seem they do exactly the same thing you do on your own, but that is impossible, right?