Science & Industry

No more slots means all your alts can work on a small pos and one single lab/array per type so I'd say yes it's worth it. Index costs sucks though. But that's almost the same for everyone. Unless you have a very large pocket of safe nullsec at your own disposal, then that's where you can make a bit of extra margin moving your assembly pos around but that requires extra time and effort so.... back to square one.

You do save yourself the 10% station tax building from a POS and you also get a 2% material saving. It all depends on what and how much your building as to whether that is actually enough to justify the fuel cost of running a POS.

As to your other question, smalls are cheap to run and a whole corp can build and research out of one but they are easy to RF even in HiSec should you be unlucky enough not to be able to pull the tower down before a wardec goes live.

Depends on what "worth it" means to you. Costs ~220mil/month to run a Medium Tower, anything bigger isn't usually worth it imo.
You've got to watch them like a hawk now, especially if you've got BPOs or materials for jobs. Do the math and see if you're willing to commit the extra effort.

The system index is annoying. Generally, systems with more numerous NPC stations has more capacity to dampen the index rise vs the jobs submitted.
You want to aim for 0-2% index. 4% is bad, especially for multi-billion jobs like capitals/freighters. Anything over 5%, I'd personally consider as insane :P - unless I'm running small jobs e.g. manufacturing 100 shuttles.

Based on my own rough calculations, BP research costs for me come out to roughly 15-20mil/BP/month. Even with a pretty modest 20 BPs researched per month the 1/3 time savings pays for itself. (I'm paying 400mil in a POS when I would be paying 600mil in station)

The real money comes with copying for ISK. If you currently make more than 15mil ISK/day copying then getting a small POS will allow you to make 22.5mil ISK/day and this difference covers the cost of fuel.

I have used T2 industry to fund PLEXes for multiple accounts for years. Pre-crius, I ran a large POS stuffed with advanced labs to make all the copies I needed for invention. Then I did invention and manufacturing at public stations. After crius, the copy slot bottleneck has gone away. I have kissed my POS goodbye.

I suppose index costs are an issue for some sorts of research and manufacturing, but for the stuff I make, the job costs are so small I completely ignore them. I'd run my operation out of Jita if there was a research facility there. There isn't, so I work out of an NPC station one jump away.

To me the biggest problem with a POS isn't the fuel cost, its the annoying extra time using the POS adds to every job. Out of a public station, all my industry alts use the same shared corp hangar. Everything I need to make stuff gets dumped there. When I want to make something I just click on a blueprint and start a job. With a POS, every time I start an industry job I have to open up my shopping list program, enter all the stuff I want to make, move all the materials to the correct POS structure to make the particular item I want to make, then finally start the job. And when I want to check if I have items lying around unused that need hauling to market or whatever, I have to check every assembly array in the POS to make sure there's not something I forgot about. in the public station I just check the one shared hangar.

And then there's the hauling. This is a problem because you can't just plop a POS down anywhere you like in highsec. I doubt you can find an unused highsec moon anywhere within 10 jumps of Jita. Which means you're probably going to have to wardec somebody and blow up their offline tower to get a spot. That's an iffy proposition, in many cases you can get away with few consequences, in others somebody is going to get righteously pissed and you'll have a vendetta on your hands. Constant wardecs by pissed off players can play merry hob with an industrial operation. The bottom line is, using a POS is generally going to mean you have to operate farther from a market hub than you would if you stuck to an NPC station. Hauling goods to market and raw materials back sucks a lot of time, and time is ISK.

Mind you, my strategy does not apply to all types of manufacturing, or even most of them. But it works for me. For my operation a POS would be a ridiculous waste.

I just want to point out that I have found in the past 5 days over 15 free moons scattered within 5 jumps of Jita and that wasn't doing any serious looking, just spending an hour or two jetting around in a cov-ops. Moons are more free now than ever before because people can't be bothered witht he headache of a PoS and are willing to pay the station costs to avoid those headaches.

Also your comment about hauling is true, I used to run 2 large PoS's in HS and the micro management moving crap from point A to point B then to market ate a decent amount of time, even using fast transport ships or cov ops for the smaller stuff.