ED is a pretty dystopian setting after a massive crash of civilization and technology. Or so I rationalize the low-tech approach.
Only "crash" in the ED lore I know about is when humanity shutdown all their AIs when they tried to revolt. A number of peopled died, but they managed to shut them down in time before the damage was catastrophic. The lingering after effect is that without AI tools for design, spaceship design basically froze for a long time. Hence, why we are only seeing new ship designs lately and not a lot of them. [Source: EDRPG Exploration Sourcebook].
Honestly, I wish FDEV would add some of the remnant AI enemies (ships) to the game. Some of those are absolutely freaky (e.g. the Asp Explorer merged with two "docked" sidewinders) and would be tough kills (advanced ECM jams gimballed/turreted weapons like non-stop chaff).
Actually, there is another crash - the constant switching of different hyperdrive tech. That is very official and documented on Drew Wagar's site. However, as we're in the "golden age" of hyperdrive tech, I'm not sure it matters.
Concerning the OP's concern: the lack of good navigation tools is just due to the oversight of the Dev team. That added in planetary landings with 2.0 and didn't think we would need to set waypoints, etc. to explore planets. Ugh. Hopefully, this will be addressed with all the new tools were getting in the Q4 update.