This is how out of touch you are with the average player experience in Elite, especially for new players. This isn't even remotely accurate, it's just not.
I remember my new player experience and I know how much faster credit acquisition has become.
In the game setting of Elite, ships would be as easy to acquire and move about as motor vehicles are today.
They were considerably easier than this even before ship transfers.
They would have to be, or else there's no way you could hold all these systems together with any kind of viable Government or economy.
Earth has had examples of continent spanning governments for upwards two-thousand years and intercontinental trade considerably longer. Trade and governments do not require instantaneous communication or transportation, though more rapid logistics has certainly transformed them. Before the modern era it wasn't unusual for the frontiers or colonies of larger nations/empires to be out of touch with central authorities for months or years at a time.
If it tooks days or weeks to cross the bubble and months or years to reach Colonia, it would be more than fast enough for the sort of goverments we have in ED. Indeed, in the setting's own lore the first thousand years of FTL travel, when most of these polities were established, had travel significantly slower than this.
having to log on regularly to dump credits in your carrier is STILL A chore
Can't this be paid in advance?
I completely understand that feeling but how would someone like you get it back? Bullets would go up in price progressively based on your income? Serious question.
Expenses could have made it difficult to consistently accrue vast surpluses in the first place and any rational economy would feature inflation vaguely proportional to money supply, barring some paradigm shift in manufacturing costs.
In game terms, they could abstract things by looking at average number of credits per CMDR and base prices off that. Wouldn't be anywhere near ideal, but it would be far more believable than having the equivalent of every loaf of bread cost a dollar when the minimum wage is twenty-thousand dollars an hour.