Oh lord, here come the elite spend-days-finding-leet-rout-slopey-thrudd-don't-trash-my-space-trucking fanboys.
(btw RES is waaaay better).
By all means, trash trading. I've always been for higher combat rewards. I campaigned relentlessly for the combat rewards buff despite repeated posts similar to yours telling me I was wrong, trading should be the best, combat rewards of less than 1m/hour were fine, I should trade if I want to make money, not all professions need to be equal, why do I need to rush to buy an anaconda etc, etc, etc.
Thankfully, FD ignored all of them and listened to people like me and changed the game so that combat is better for progression. And it's a lot better. Without "gaming" the system, I can easily rack up about 2m/hour bounties on a good session, excluding the need to hand them in of course. And, I need luck to get the right spawns. It's better than trading,
for newer pilots and lower end ships. It matches and can be better than rares trading, but you need to game the system for this, or be lucky with the spawns. A small percentage of players claim to game the Res system so hard, with endless reloads, to make as much as 4m/hour.
But these claims always ignore the hard, cold facts. In order to make 4m/hour, they have to launch from their station, fly to the Res, do their game thing, which is random, until they get that perfect scenario. They "make 4m per hour". But what do they have in their bank account?
Nothing more than when they started. They must
then fly to the relevant systems to hand those bounties in.
Now, let's compare the "elite" bounty hunter's work day to the equivalent "elite" trader.
I can log in and within 10 minutes I have over 1.3m in my bank. Actual profit. No need to go hand it in. That's it. Done. One hour later, I've topped 6.5m. I can log off. In the same time, the "elite, best of the best" bounty hunter has maybe just about started to get the right random spawn to happen and had made about 1-2m in bounties. But let's assume they got lucky and the right spawns started immediately and they logged in to the Res, having logged out at the RES previously... They've got 2.5m less than me.
And they still have to fly to a minimum of two stations just to hand that in. In the time it takes them to just hand in, I'll have made another 2.6m.
You might want to rethink your position that "RES is waaaaay better"
