Which is one of the big problems Frontier have with balancing, of course - most of the things they've had to nerf, especially mission-related ones, but mining too, have only had problematic earning rates (by modern standards, anyway) when done in particular ways in edge-case systems.
But it's a big player base so it's not hard for those edge cases to be found and shared and very slowly and carefully explained to the less awake players.
I'm reasonably sure that in the right places, there are other mission types which could give stacked massacre missions a serious challenge too, given how much I'm getting from doing one or two of them casually while focusing on other things, which would be a lot harder for Frontier to nerf - again, 300M/hour solo, massively boostable as a wing, should be achievable, in optimal circumstances.
Meanwhile the balance of earnings for non-optimal play is still all over the place. I fly a 120t multirole Krait II, and in order of income per trip:
- a large stack of courier missions
- "non-optimal" trade missions (even a plain 1.5M delivery mission, or getting lucky with a source mission asking for cargo you'd already got in hold)
- exploration scans that happen to include a mapped terraformable
- the bounty for the pirate (mission or tasty) that comes after you
- trade profit (Extraction exports)
- lone courier missions
- trade profit (anything else)
- exploration scans
They're not even remotely balanced against each other, for classic "fly around a bit, do stuff" gameplay, even if the higher end payouts are starting to line up a bit better.
Not sure what the answer to that is beyond "abolish credits, gate access to ships some other way if it's to be done at all"
