According to your sig you've got triple elite and have maxed out on both military ranks, I imagine a fair amount of repetitive grind was involved. The guardian stuff is much easier than any of them, perhaps the issue is grind related burnout.
I am not the issue, the gamplay design of the guardians unlock sucks, its rude to infer its my fault just because I've got a lot of accomplishments in the game. The reason I have those is that I've got a lot of hours logged in the game rather than min-max-grinding the game. My Empire rank was the result of genuinely pushing the Empires interests in the BGS, the fed one was done in a weekend's donation grinding at 17 draconis with a chequebook to rear admiral, then the last two were done outside the bubble somewhere in about a week of running about in my imperial courier - I know I deliberately done it in an imperial ship to show my true colours in an ironic gesture of defiance to the feds. The Elite Trade rank came about as I raised the credits to equip the big ships I now had the ranks for but not the credits for. Completing the set with Exploration was something I had to tackle head on, so when 2.3 initially released I did a lot of long range passenger missions, I've covered 475,000LY now, visited a lot of the tourist beacons far far out and seen some stunning sights en-route to that third elite.
I gather a lot of people got their elite exploration while remaining in the bubble during that awful time when the entirety of passenger mission payout was counting as exploration data value. Even now with exploration data values being hiked up but the thresholds of the exploration ranks not being any higher, the rank now is a lot easier gotten than it was then, cheapened you might say.
Coming back to your point, I've gotten those ranks via a multitude of different playstyles, able to dip in and out of those as I pick and choose, even the more exclusive modes. When I needed a brake from jumping about the galaxy onwards to shiny pretty sights, I could hand in a batch of missions and goof about the bubble playing BGS, running missions, fighting conflict zones, trading, what ever. The guardian stuff is either a case of tackle it head on while you are out there, or waste multiple hours jonking through the nomans land in the middle between the guardian ruins and our bubble, and each time you get back to the guardian ruins it will be the same data terminals awaiting you to scan it another three dozen times, whether they be all done this visit or in multiple visits. Given the demands on my time where I can often steal an hour for gaming here or there, but sometimes go weeks without time to log in, it stuck me as better use of my time to stay at the guardians bit until I had everything I needed. Indeed it took me about three nearly four weeks of such sessions here or there to gather all the materials, much less grindy than your alleged 5 hour speed run.
