Galnet is a news network, there could be ships getting the news to every system, CQC is just another game mode, you don't get to fight in your ASP, it's just like a simulator like Arena commander in Star Citizen, chat and other stuff is part of the game.
There reason why I think trade routes should not be on the website is cause it spoils the game and tell you where to go to make easy money, people should learn trade routes by playing the game and communicate with other people, not having a website tell you where to go to make money, that's lazy and gamebreaking, it's like a cheat
They aren't , in stories covered by lore they play rather interesting role. There's considerable delay of information traveling trough human space and writers play around it rather well. Regarding trading and other data it is obvious gameplay device so players would have to seek information themselves or trough other channels, or take a risk to follow trade routes. As I said before, it is game rewarding risk/decision making and if you want just press buttons and become richer automatically, maybe it is not that game then to play.
You boys are trying really hard to make excuses for something when it just isn't going to fly. "Writers play around it"...how exactly? How does the news get to me 50,000Ly away, isolated, that's a heck of a prediction that they wrote, stored on my ship computer behind a firewall not allowing it to be read for months and months. You can't say, "it's a game, it's okay for there to be chat and positioning and powerplay and etc etc etc, but not this and this and this, because reasons that are mine!".
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Trading isn't fun because of finding a route, that's tedium (maybe you have fun, of course, maybe you have fun poking yourself in the eye, not judging), what's fun is: making credits, evading the cops (bulk smuggling), evading pirates (bulk trading), meeting BGS demands, flying efficiently, affecting the landscape of the galaxy. However, trading is only setup to do these in a very partial and hollow way. Meeting BGS demand is little more than "my commodity ran out, better wait till it fills back up, I'll go to my backup route", evading pirates/cops is nothing more than "submit, boost, high wake". In the end, however you found your route, you're just looking to make as much money as you can, as fast as you can, that leaves "making credits/flying efficiently" as the bulk of the trading fun because the rest just isn't meaty enough to be satisfying.
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A well designed trade system would have all the information available everywhere (it just doesn't make sense for it not to be there), it would come down to be a matter of who could get the contacts to source the material fast and cheap and get it there quickly and reliably. The mechanics just aren't in the game to be able to do this, though. So trading isn't interactive, it isn't deep, it isn't skillful. It's luck, it's grindy and it's shallow.
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Want to make trading fun and deep and interactive, throw it largely on the mission structure, mixed with the CG structure. I take a contract to move x number of goods to y system, the more I fulfill the more money I make, it's their goods so I'm responsible to find more if I lose some to pirates. I get better contracts based on reliable, fast performance (rep structure) and slowly build up a trade network allowing me to source a variety of goods from many systems so that when the particularly lucrative "we need this and have no source" contracts come in, I have the contacts to get ahold of it. The black market works the same way, but with a higher risk/reward.
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But I suppose if staring at a galaxy map looking for ag/high tech stations near one another to find that station A with high supply sells good x for 20% more than station b with low supply is "deep, immersive gameplay", then what we have is fine.
