In the older titles ship prices were better balanced from game start, and i don't think i ever made enough to buy a panther clipper (for example), even after years of playing (but not exactly grinding for credits).
This is nothing to do with better balance, and everything to do with you not watching "How To Get A Panther Clipper In 4 Hours" Youtube videos back in the 90s (for many reasons...)
I dug out my old copy of FE2 this afternoon and went flat-out for earnings (not entirely optimally, in retrospect, but decently).
- end of hour 1: just upgraded for the first time to an Adder, got a bit of spare cash. Okay, that's not too bad considering I was speedrunning it.
- end of hour 2: via a Cobra I and Constrictor (skipped the Cobra III and the Asp as my money was going up too fast to need them), I've now upgraded to a Transporter and have a lot of spare cash. Ah. Less good.
- end of hour 3: I have a Tiger Trader and 1.6M spare cash and I'm earning about 100k per run. Almost there...
- since trade in from Tiger to Panther is only 2.3M, it didn't take me the whole hour to buy the ship. (Could probably even have done it within 3 hours if a suitable opportunity to upgrade to the Puma as a stepping stone had come up, or I'd got luckier with the "buying Robots" on the bulletin board, but still, good enough)
Four hours, by a method that even a beginner could follow (zero combat, zero fancy flying, basically point-and-click), and I'd got the most expensive ship in the game, and plenty of money to equip it and fill its hold. Now, sure, it wasn't particularly fun, but that's optimised grinding for you in any game. Every FE2 profession except high-end bulk trade basically earns peanuts, so if you play the game like you're "supposed to" - missions, combat, excitement, visiting more than 3 systems ever - yeah, it takes quite a lot longer and a lot of trips through the die-reload-retry cycle to get anywhere near the Panther. But if you play it like an Elite Dangerous walkthrough grinder, it's very quick indeed.
Elite Dangerous is certainly not great for credit balance, but even with current earnings I think it'd be impossible for an unassisted beginner to get an A-rated Anaconda within 4 hours (though an experienced player resetting their account probably can manage it). And obviously a Corvette or Cutter - or engineering the Anaconda - isn't going to happen in that timescale.
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As far as the bounty cap goes, it was set back when 30M/hour was "shut down that exploit" levels of earning. It could certainly be increased to 10-20M without any serious exploitability in the context of current legitimate credit earning rates, even if they don't want to remove it entirely. Removing the cap entirely but making PvP bounties split rather than copy when claimed as a wing would make it entirely useless for credit transfer/gain as it'd always be negative-sum compared with the existing FC zero-sum and Wing Mission positive-sum methods for giving other players money, so again no exploit there.