I had a massive post, but I ditched it, coz I don't want to be "that guy" who runs around making an essay about poor design choices and sounding very "I told you so"-ish
tl;dr I think the whole "Meta-alloy's are bugged" is a ridiculous claim, and incredibly meta to try and pursue it for info out of FD. Nonetheless, I'm completely unsurprised. This is what happens, just like I alluded to months back, when you put objective-based content into fixed or random locations based on some ruleset, with no pathway to actually discover that thing. You get terrible gameplay like trying to meta the answer out of the devs (intentional or not).
UA's were exactly the same (sans mission). Months down the track they're easier to find now than Combat Stabilisers, and we still have no clue why they're in a 135-150LY shell around Merope, and have no indication as to why we should've been able to find them in the first place.
I think what FD are going for here is content like the mysteries that we have come across IRL throughout history, where more is understood about them long after they're first discovered. Take Death Valley's gliding rocks as an example.
The trickiest thing about doing this, from our point of view, is whether or not our 'scientific enquiry' (if you can call it that) and application of logic can lead to any 'discovery' as such, since it requires the content and rules to be in the first place for us to be able to discover it!
Putting that aside - because I think if you delve too deep into it then that way madness lies - the principle of 'hiding' things in hard to find places, be it via deliberate placement or low-probability RNG, doesn't necessarily bother me.
The key is whether some application of logic can yield results.
So, with the UA shell, it's sufficiently big enough that no clue was required - someone was bound to stumble across a free-floating UAeventually, because of the high incidence of systems with those SSSs.
The same couldn't be said for the convoys - there was no logical reason for them to have appeared where they did, even when you take into account the Wings trailer. Nevertheless, the community was able to identify some systems in which convoys could be found and, eventually, start liberating UAs from them.
The primary frustration now with the barnacle/Meta-Alloys thing is that there appears to be some knowledge held by 'Interstellar explorers' about where these things appear and where they come from, but that knowledge is not held by us, nor does it appear to be discoverable, so all the theorising we do about where they'll be found is based on guesswork, either educated (e.g. trying to reason for star types, asteroid belt make up, planetary make up, etc) or not.
But I think whatever the reasons for where and why all these things are, they will eventually be known and will probably make sense. The question is whether we're able to discover it for ourselves, or whether we have to rely on characters like Palin to give it to us.
I'll stick around for the ride either way, but I know many won't, and haven't.
