Nah, I think several of us knew this was bound to happen even during the betas. It's just that nobody apparently wanted to go to the trouble of creating such a route. Plus there was already something from much earlier that could be used to a similar end: MattG's Great Earth-like World Tour.
Besides, how would Frontier even nerf this? If they decreased exploration payouts, there would be a large, and justified, outcry. They could increase the rank thresholds, but I wonder if they really could - perhaps they went with the "scan payouts contribute half points" approach because that was easier to do than tinkering with every character's remaining rank progression.
The only other way would be to jack the first discovery bonus up - say, have it be 500% instead of 50%. Then decrease the base prices. However, I don't think FD would want to do that, because as others have mentioned, the whole concept of first discoveries disadvantages people who go out later.
Well, like I said before, regardless of how it's calculated, the whole concept of exploration ranking doesn't fit well with the idea of actual exploration. Perhaps it might have been better to go with how it was in all the earlier Elite games, and have one Elite rating only (combat), but eh, who knows. Far too late for such anyway.
Oh, and you (Becky) are right that this is a good way of starting up any alts. The thing about exploration is that the barrier of entry is very low, and even a cheap Hauler can do quite well at it. More expensive ships equal more profit for trade and combat, but much less so for exploration. So, if you just want to get an alt geared up quick, it's probably the best method.
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. I did a similar journey to visit ELWs and hit Elite before 2.3. I tweaked it for 2.3 but didn't get round to writing it up. Like yours, it doesn't stray more than 600LY from Sol... crazy. The pre-2.3 route went _much_ further.
