If you don't want the planets taken (or only rarely taken) you could tweak your universe's cannon and have some sort of all powerful protector, ala the Monolith in the 2001 universe, that smites those that harm the protected planets. It might explain why the protected planets have remained unoccupied so long, as well.
Neutral planets
I just remembered from KoToR that planet Manaan was a neutral zone providing "kolto" which has amazing healing power so neither of parties would dare to invade there as they threaten to destroy source of kolto in that case.
Religion sometimes acts as a good deterrent, especially if your own soldiers are religious and the planet you are trying to invade is considered "holy", or otherwise has landmarks of religious significance.
In the 'Foundation' series of SciFi novels by Isaac Asimov, during one point in the foundation's history, they used a fake religion based around nuclear technology to hold influence over the peoples of foreign planets, and when one of them rebelled, they called it 'sacrilege' and shut down the nuclear power plants and overthrew the ruler of the planet.
In another time during 'Foundation' history, they used deprivation of luxury goods as a deterrent. If the USA ever went to war with China, our population would be seriously annoyed at all our cheap goods going by-by.
It doesn't have to be luxury goods either - it could be control over a key resource. If the USA declared war against the entire middle-east, our oil prices shooting above $6 or $7 a gallon would A) make the war unpopular with the citizens (Vietnam-style protesting), and B) make our military machine most costly to run because of the dependence on oil for moving supplies and troops.
It's more beneficial to have them as an independent country than to have them take your orders.
One example of this is when there are more than one military power about, none of them really trusting each other, or only having several small alliances, having a small neutral buffer-nation between you and a potential enemy that the enemy has to conquer first, gives you a substantial enough warning (sometimes netting you several weeks) and sufficient time to call up your reserves and bolster your defenses as well as negotiate resource or military aid from allies or neighbors who are now also at risk.
Even if a secret deal exists with your 'buffer-nation' and your enemy, it'll still take the enemy a day or more to rapidly move through the faux-neutral nation, still giving you a warning time to at least sound the alert and get into position, plus their soldiers would then be attacking from unfamiliar faux-neutral terrain into your unfamiliar-to-them terrain, without having time to really get accustomed to their inherited fixed defenses, while your soldiers are familiar with the terrain and fixed defenses of that area.
Basically, buffer-nations can dramatically cripple the element of surprise.
Birth of the Federation had a pretty decent "minor race" system. It was from Microprose and so the game was very similar to Master of Orion 2 in a lot of ways. If you could convince the allied race to join forces, you received a unique benefit. Lots of these benefits were research themed Vulcans (35% bonus research), some were unique building structures (+50% ground defense), morale based, etc. The main way you got them to join your empire was with diplomacy, but sometimes you could use force as well.
For your game, you could make the "conquering" option have some additional drawbacks. If a particular race has a great mind for terraforming sciences, they might work a little bit slower if you conquered them so maybe only give out half the bonus. I don't think you should punish players too harshly for going this route. If they want to play a warmongering butt-head, let them. :)
Conquering a world carries some of its own drawbacks anyway. First it takes resources, ships, ground forces, etc. And if you're wanting to keep those cool racial benefits around, you're going to have to maintain a military/police presence on the ground to ensure they don't revolt. These forces could be used elsewhere. Plus the act of subjugating another race, might cause a little bit of unrest in the rest of your colonies depending on their culture/neutral relationship.
If you just bomb the population to dust, sure you have yourself a new planet to colonize, but I think most players would try the allies route to get those little bonuses.
I think some of the bonuses in BotF were a little out of whack though. If you happened to snag a couple of the "empire-wide research" bonus races, you could run away with the tech game. Keep an eye out towards balancing this if you go this route.
Some worlds just might not be a suitable environment for the major races. Maybe there's a race of strange beings that live inside a gas giant for example.
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