Those supporting the return of the ADS appear to be, in the main, still playing the game regularly - whilst disliking the current mechanic - and are unlikely to leave the game they are so passionate about, so the topic is equally unlikely to die either.
Quite. Plenty of veteran explorers still play, they just play less than they used to. Plenty have left though. In the end, however, if you asked them,
the ones who explored the most and are thus most impacted by the change, how they would react if the honk revealed the system map again (
not auto-scanning anything at infinite range, that concept was new to the FSS), even if it required fitting more modules or whatever other compromise, I'd safely bet that the overwhelming majority would be in favour of that. Whether those who left would return just for this, though, I'm not so sure about. For many, the way the FSS was forced on explorers without any regard to feedback was the final straw, and the dashed expectations of the "exploration update" in general, but not the only issues for why they quit. Thousands of people who went on DW2 quit exploring afterward (or
during the expedition), so it's also not like they just didn't give the "new" exploration a fair try.
I'm saying it's "new" because the new Chapter Four content is both so bugged and of low enough quality that few people care about it. From what I can tell, not only are very few explorers out there who focus on it (could count them on one hand), but few had ever focused on it beyond the beta. So what still interests most is the galaxy itself, not the hand-crafted content sprinkled at a few small places. So if Frontier would give people a choice of what tools they could use? I believe most would be positive towards that and wouldn't argue against it, and especially those who've explored a lot.
Besides, even from those who don't, how many are vocally anti-choice? Three or four maybe?
Of course, Frontier won't change things with exploration for the foreseeable future because they aren't even fixing bugs, but I wouldn't count on them not changing anything later. And while they did post one time that they are happy with how the FSS is (good for them, many aren't), I wouldn't count on that being final. Plus it's not like they would keep closing threads whenever this issue resurfaces again.
Oh, and a bit of clarification on the new content being bugged, for those who don't know. This is mostly about NSPs, not surface stuff, although a few times, those vanish as well. How does discovery (not) work there?
First, suppose you were lucky enough to stumble upon an NSP area. Most of them are quite small (except three that cover their entire region), and were either hand-places near areas of other interest (such as Colonia, or
the farthest system South, or near the
end of the Outer Arm) or appear to have been put somewhere by random. If you entered an NSP system, you also have to be lucky enough for the NSPs to actually spawn, because there are times they don't, and you have to relog a couple of times to actually see them. So if you wanted to make sure you didn't miss any, you'd have to relog in each and every system you visit - ouch! Good luck finding anyone like that.
Second, suppose you were lucky enough to find an NSP that did actually spawn. You fly there, see the things in there, and perhaps you found something that isn't on the Codex: something new! Excellent. You try targetting it to scan it... and you can't. Or you can target it, but you can't use the composition scanner on it. The outcome either way is that it won't appear on the Codex. Turns out that you might not have even been the first to discover these, it's just bugged and you can't tell.
Then even if the scanner does work as it should, there are also times when the new finds don't actually register with the global Codex. They'll register on your end until you log out, but after that, it's back to the same status as before.
So yeah, there we go. Is it any wonder that many people quit exploring, when the new content what most people were looking forward to turned out to be like this? Then there's the quality of said content too, when it does actually work as intended. You find a few things, visit them once, and have no reason to do so again. If you were lucky enough to find something new that actually worked, you get your tag in the Codex, but otherwise, all you get are a meager amount of credits. The content itself is what I call "Youtube material": thing that might be worth seeing once, but is almost as good seeing on someone else's video as it is seeing for yourself. (Unlike Guardian or Thargoid sites, which are great to drive around in yourself.) Some of the edge cases of the procedurally generated content are also worth seeing for yourself, and unlike the hand-crafted stuff, you know these won't run out, so you can find your own. (The handmade content generally runs out within a month or two of its launch, if not sooner.)
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