The danger of course is that we would end up with more Dav's Hope type scenario's, where something becomes the "go to" location for X material. Is that bad or good? Depends on your outlook, grinders will love it and hate it at the same time, it's a pain to keep grinding the same location over and over again to get X, while at the same time grinding the same location over and over again to get X.
Dav's Hope is just an example of this being accidentally created and so... not very fun. It's not the only place of its kind but it's famous and so players go there.
Is it fun? Not at all, at least not after the first 25 circuits. It's the same with the shard forests. They're a lot better than RNG and they are actually fun for the first time you do them. They also give you enough mats to last you for absolutely ages so are, in my opinion, the best source for materials and it's a shame they're limited to raw only. But are they good game play? Not particularly, but it's still a good addition to the game as an
option and the game could do with more of the same
.
The problem isn't
here though, it's the core design of enginerring as a whole and this is because of the way they implemented them as alternative currency systems (because that's what they are), of how they're used and in the quantities they're required. I mean, FD gave in to the complaints for EDH materials by simply making us get x3 every time
That tells a very clear story about design decisions.
They could have gone with a list of materials that's about 10 times shorter, given us fun and compelling ways to get them all throughout the whole game (not just HGEs for one example) and then made it so we do not need them repeatedly, over and over again, every time we wish to build another module of the same type. For the engineer unlocking process, they could have given us a mission that's unique to each (there aren't that many) and so made each tell its own story. If it is essential to lock off credits as a currency entirely then fine, make it so the engineers require a new currency so you can make new modules of the types you've unlocked but make that currency fun to get.
I'm about to embark on yet another (my fourth) engineering unlock process as my girlfriend has just started playing and I am joining her in the pain of it all. I know exactly what I'm going to do for every section of this process because I know exactly what the fastest method is for every single item I'll need. I know a whole bunch of it will be dull, repetetive and exhausting. But if I don't do it, I'll be in a rubbish ship that can't do much of what the game offers and if I don't do it efficiently, I know I'll be forever sat on random stuff that won't be useful at all (you can't just randomly play the game and accidentally realise you can upgrade an item, you need to really, really focus on it because nothing in the game tells you anything about it until you visit the engineer). I already know what she'll say to me... "Why do this? Can't we just get stuff naturally?" because that's how it works in several other games we play and a part of me wants to just let her go ahead and try so she can find out for herself. Even explaining it to her makes me think I sound like a nutcase. Why would I wilingly do this?
Yup, Dav's Hope will be in there, no doubt... it's the fastest way to get G1-4 stuff in general when you are starting out with zero stock. A little bit of nostalgia that'll wear off after I've done the circuit 50 times again. It just didn't have to be this way. It was bad enough that they tried to add MMORPG crafting into a space simulator by blugeoning us with it this way and leaving us with more module/power bloat than you can shake a stick at but the fact they decided to make it so convoluted (try doing the whole thing without once using a third party tool, as a brand new player) just made it way worse.
The convoluted nature of it is where they went wrong initially. Dav's Hope is just the outcome of that and isn't the solution. The game's initial A-E ship building system was so simple and well designed, it was complicated enough to take time to fully understand and has lots of nuance but it is so simple in design that it works so well. Compare that to engineering...
