Some people (myself included) are hacked off about the fact that long-range smuggling is by far the least ship dependent mission type when it comes to making buckets of money. Your proft-earning is essentially maxed-out by the time you get into a stripped-down Asp, and at that point is much higher than an Elite-ranked combat pilot in the most expensive ships in the game. Thus there is a trend going where pilots of other, less lucrative professions feel compelled to do shadow deliveries because they either A) really want to experience large ships, B) want to fast-track to high-end ships to make their preferred mode of play more profitable, or C) they think a bigger ship will make up for their deficiencies as a pilot, primarily in combat.
That said it's not really an issue with smuggling, but an issue with the bounty board and the activity reward structure in general. The vast majority of missions are deeply unrewarding to the point of parody, even at the highest reward tier (elite missions). Thus the best way to make money is to simply farm pirates or A-B trade routes, with the only bulletin board activity even remotely worth doing being the aforementioned shadow deliveries. This is a problem that needs to be addressed, but by raising rewards and offering better quality missions to combat pilots and traders that are worth doing without stacking a thousand of them beforehand by tediously switching modes for two hours straight.
And I imagine that most of the players not farming have a better time of it than those who farm and then wonder what to do when they achieve what they set out to do.
