First, let's recap. Riverside said that the ADS was universally popular (as opposed to the BDS and IDS), which you (Darkfyre) took as meaning that the "old style" of exploration was more popular than the "FSS style", and countered that since in your interpretation, people visited more systems over time in the FSS era even after the DW2 players dropped off than they did before the ADS, that means the FSS is more popular. This was your argument for it. Now, I listed the omissions that you made, and how they combined mean you're wrong on people visiting new systems more now than they did before. Especially if you look at the official numbers.
Your response to this is to seize on the words "exploration activity" in themselves, and suddenly bring in time spent per system, which you didn't bring up before and we have no data on, so you've gone from analysis to guessing.
I would guess though that people also spend less time per system. Why? Because Frontier stated that they want them to spend less time flying, they can scan bodies and find surface POIs much faster, and the content plus reasons to stay are pretty much the same and of the same length as before, so no changes there. (The only larger content addition was that of NSPs, and they are so rare that in practice, they contribute a tiny amount of extra time spent in systems.)
While I definitely overlooked the addition of consoles to the mix, it would be useful to know the overall distribution of contributions by platform, to determine if the 10% uptick in visited systems represents console players.
What 10% uptick in visited systems? Based on the official data, it's -27% in visited new systems. Based on the EDSM data, even assuming a current contribution of 0% of systems uploaded to EDDN by console players (which is provably false, but I'm only using it as it would be the minimum), it would be 2019 July to 2020 February would be an average of 955k systems per month, while 2018 January to 2018 August would be 909k then. (The FSS's reveal was in September, so it already started effecting things, soon plunging the new systems to its lowest point to date.) That's less than a +5% uptick, and remember, no console players: it's +5% at best. If we assume that console players would contribute 5% of the systems, which is already quite conservative, it would be 958k. From then on, it's more - and bear in mind that the range I chose was already past the prime of exploration.
So, I'm sorry, but even according to the third-party data, there's no 10% uptick. (Even that wouldn't be significant, mind you.) What there actually was was that during DW2, there was a new peak of 1.752 million new systems in a month, up from the previous peak of 1.484 million. The fact that current levels are nowhere near that would prove that it wasn't due to the FSS, but due to DW2 adding much more activity.
In other words, systems can't be used as proof if you wish to say that the FSS is more popular than the ADS.
Now, as for time that might have been spent. Sorry, but I think you're forgetting that the old DSS had mods, and you didn't have to fly as close to the planet as you have to map it now, leading to considerably less time spent. There were some video experiments measuring the exact effects of the various mods, but I don't know of any comparing the same flight routes with the DSS.
That said, let's see. Planets / systems peaked at 0.9 during the ADS era (it's quite interesting that it had a slow but constant upward trend), but let's be pessimistic and go with 0.66 planet per system then. By comparison, after DW2, we have an average of 5.3 planets per system FSS-d. How much time per system?
Let's go with seven seconds per body in the FSS (based on figures others quoted before, I think that's generous), and two minutes per body with appropriately modded DSS. In that case, time spent per system scanning bodies is 37.1 seconds with the FSS and 79.2 seconds with modded DSS. Which means Frontier did achieve their stated aim of reducing time by removing flight.
So let's move on to mapping then, shall we? Obviously, pre-FSS this wasn't a concern. Now, with ELWs / Systems making up 0.5% after DW2, let's be generous again and say that the majority of explorers would fly to WWTCs and ELWs to map them (our example explorers likes credits), and they would find 4 WWTCs to each ELW, and for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that these are spread out evenly across systems. (Which they likely wouldn't, which would lead to less time spent flying.) So, they'd map something in 2.5% of the systems they visit: that's 0.025 mappings per system. Median distance to arrival would be 1100 ls (source of this is statistics I've made on ELWs), which would be a bit over two minutes (source if the Fuel Rat formula): I'll round down to two because to DSS, you don't have to arrive at the exact destination.
So that's an average of three seconds spent per system on travel time to map a body. Now, I don't really know how much time doing the DSS to completion takes on an ELW, as I never measured it, but surely it can be done in a minute. That way, we're up to 4.5 seconds per system.
Summing them all up: based on the uploads that players have made, 41.6 seconds per system scanning and mapping with the FSS, 79.2 seconds per system scanning with the old modded DSS.
However! That was with seven seconds per body with the FSS. You yourself said only one second per body, and a required 15 seconds per every system. I don't quite agree with this, but let's see the results if we use them. 20.3 seconds spent FSS-ing each system instead of the 37.1 I estimated above, adding up to a total of 24.8 seconds per system spent scanning and mapping. Versus the 79.2 seconds per system before.
I mean, that proves nicely that Frontier did decrease the time players would have to spend, but your point was that players spend more time exploring, while this says that based on what the more dedicated explorers upload, they're spending significantly less time on scanning
and mapping than they did on just scanning.
Of course, you could still try to argue that they are spending more time on other stuff, even though we have no data on that. I think everyone can judge whether or not they spend almost thrice as much time per system average as the time they spend on scanning, flying and mapping.
It would be useful if we knew the median and average bodies per system, but players are engaging with the FSS at least long enough to resolve about five bodies per system.
Can't tell you the median unfortunately, but the average is around 10-12 bodies per system, depending on which area of the galaxy you're looking at.
So far, the minimum amount of time spent in a system, assuming your typical ELW hunter, is twice what it was during the ADS era. If the overall exploration population remained the same, then I would've expected the number of system visited to have dropped by at least 40%.
Assuming "your typical ELW hunter", WWTCs are out, so we're down to mapping in 0.05% of systems. That means... 21.2 seconds.
Now, some other stuff:
You forgot the fourth option that explorers chose: they didn't explore at all.
Um. Surely you can see the contradiction in calling someone who doesn't explore an explorer. (You replied to Riverside's "When the ADS was available, what proportion of explorers do you suppose chose to fit a BDS (quite a few, it was pre-installed on every new ship), the IDS (basically nobody) or an ADS (almost universally popular)?", for context.)
For example, in principle, I'd like to do some PowerPlay. But in practice, it was designed bad enough that I don't want to play it. Would I call myself a, hm, PowerPlayer? Of course not.
Again, I didn’t. I thought exploration activity was exploration activity. After all, why track other statistics like average number of stars, planets, ELW. and AWs scanned if they’re not representative of exploration activities?
Sorry, but you're twisting my words again. I said that "exploration activity" there was often, but not always, short-hand for exploration activity via number of new systems visited. Surely you can see why I wouldn't type that out at each and every time it would come out. And surely you can see that I didn't mean that exploration activity doesn't exclude other stuff. However, it's what we have the best data from Frontier on.