To play Devil's Advocate here: if it were simple enough for you to solve by yourself, it'd be solved on the same page of the thread, or even the same post, rather than a few pages later.
Taking this puzzle in isolation, the first trail of bread-crumbs is in game in the obvious systems of Sol, Achenar, Gateway, etc. as an easy-to-find navigation item any player can drop in on and listen to. That leads you to the two second in-game easy to find beacons that read out a set of numbers that you can write down on a piece of paper. The nonogram can be solved on that same piece of paper too, by one person - these are Sudoku-like puzzles after all.
There's nothing here that you couldn't have discovered and solved by yourself by playing the game instead of reading the thread… if you choose to read the thread, you're accepting spoilers of solutions to puzzles others have found already.
Perhaps there is a good argument for a page that, spoiler-free, lists the starting points of puzzles like this for people who want to solve them by themselves?
I didn't mention simplicity anywhere in my post; simplicity, or a lack thereof, is not what I was talking about.
It's probably worth pointing out though that even the starting point you mentioned with the three systems isn't what I'd consider 'obvious'. Why would I expect decoding the mysteries of alien ruins to begin in the home systems of the Federation and Empire? Why would I expect Gateway (which I had to google by the way because I've never been there in over a year of playing, I had no reason to) have anything to do with it even if we accept that the superpowers capitals are somehow the 'obvious' place to look - Alioth was the Alliance capital last time I checked? The nonogram hasn't even been fully solved
on here yet unless it's happened in the last 2 hours by the way. There are also multiple steps between listening to the messages from the numbers stations (and I did actually know what numbers stations were previously, I suspect the majority of players wouldn't have the faintest idea what one was) and actually
creating the nonogram which then needs to be solved. Etc. Etc.
Regardless of that (because as I said my fundamental point wasn't specifically about the complexity at all) just have a think about what you wrote and how much of it involves out-of -game activity. Consider this; we had people on here last night throwing excel spreadsheets together to decipher the nonogram - I'm a tax officer and just got home after 10 and a half hours spent doing moderately complex calculations and with my head buried in excel; I play this game because it allows me to pretend that I'm the commander of an interstellar space ship and wash all of that stuff that I do for a living out of my hair, not spend my evenings giving myself a worse headache than I get during the day at work
If that comes across as a bit aggressive (I think it does but I'm off to get some dinner so I'm not re-writing it) I'm sorry. I'm just tired (literally I mean, I'm actually weary of it) of having the point I'm trying to make basically conflated with this stuff being 'too hard' or 'too complex'. The point is that sitting here transcribing stuff with a pen and paper before doing sudoku is not
in-game activity. If I want to sit around doing puzzles on a notepad, in excel or anywhere else, I don't need to buy a space-sim computer game for it, I can do it online or even buy a book.
I just want in-game content to be delivered and to be 'playable' (for want of a better term) primarily within the game. If I'm not explaining it sufficiently well for you to get what I'm trying to communicate, I accept that's my problem and not yours. I also really
really don't want to derail this thread with it - people are having fun here and don't need to read me going on about this in the middle of it, I just didn't want to leave your post unanswered because I'm not ignorant. If it's OK with you, let's just leave this here, yeah? This thread is probably going to be the single least receptive place on the entire forum for my own feelings about the issue and I'm well aware of that. Not looking to trash anybody else's fun here at all, we have way too much of that on the forums already.
