So, something that I think is significant here, is that "feel" seems to be a pretty important thing for FDev.
Let me explain what I mean by this:
Elite shines brightly when it comes to the raw experience of playing the game. The audio is brilliant, the design decision to put the player as a pilot in a ship and not a camera set on or outside the ship, the "feel" of piloting our ships is hands down the best thing about the game.
The mechanics of flying in SC are a bit dull - but were designed to impart a sensation of distance and a sense of scope and space, and definitely succeed in doing so.
The mechanics of combat as a numbers game are kind of abysmal, but the feel of handling a ship in a dogfight, the sounds of your weapons, the heft of the noise and impact feels awesome.
And so on - mechanics and "feeling" aren't entirely disconnected, but this game makes it pretty obvious where the focus was at release.
Exploration, similarly, has a fantastic feel to it. Being out in the black, thousands of LY from home, feels lonely, isolated, and imparts a huge sense of distance.
I think that, once you start tweaking mechanics, you have to be really careful that you don't accidentally mess up those intangibles. Like, making scanning a planet more engaging without distracting the player from the core experience that is already hitting a lot of the core notes is a difficult piece of design work.
So when I say "Exploration is doing comparatively well" what I mean is that the intangibles are spot on. And I respect that it will take awhile to determine how to modify the mechanics without screwing with that phenomenal core "feeling."
Meanwhile, there is stuff like mining, which "feels" poor - they missed the mark. There are missions and NPC interaction, which don't even have a robust enough framework in place to start going towards the "feel" of the original vision. There is a ton of interacting stuff in the bubble that feels off, and that is also going to be challenging to fix in a way that's in keeping with the level of quality inherent in the stuff that's been done well.
So what you have with exploration is a set of core mechanics that, although they are incredibly sparse, are imparting a fantastic experience, versus a complex set of interconnected systems that are not imparting a comprible experience.
So when Braben and co. say it might be awhile before something changes, it makes sense to me.
That having been said - hell yes exploration needs some work. We need more things to find, and more importantly, interesting ways to find them. But I hope earnestly that good, long thought is put into any changes to existing mechanics or content, because a sense of wonder in a video game is a really hard thing to achieve, and a really easy thing to break - and if that means waiting, then I'm all for waiting.
I do see a lot of general quality of life improvements in the OP - a more robust route plotter probably isn't a difficult design decision. But what I'm talking about are things like "doing more with minerals finds" and "seeing where other pilots have been" - that sounds like things that could affect my core experience, and deserves some serious thought.
. 
