I think you're overselling it a bit. Supercruise has the potential for these things, but 99% of supercruise is just sitting and waiting while watching space dust zip by. Or in my case, standing and touching my toes and getting some much needed exercise in (and if it's an especially long trip, washing some dishes as well).
Maybe on journeys longer than 10 kilo-light seconds, I can see where there
might be short periods with little to do, but such trips represents maybe 10% of the potential destinations in the Bubble, and are easily avoided IME. About 50% of the destinations in the Bubble have Supercruise travel times less one minute, which is barely enough time to perform my escape and braking maneuvers, and insufficient to hunt for HGEs, let alone give NPCs a chance to even
think about intercepting you, assuming that you:
a) Don't bother using Supercruise Assist, which can easily double your travel time
b) Don't travel using the "forum recommended method," which is
almost as bad as using SA when it comes to travel times
c) Don't travel through a system's the ecliptic plane, where most of a system's mass is concentrated, which increases your travel time even more. Incidentally, outside the ecliptic plane is where HGEs spawn, so it's very easy to drop into the ones that are along your flight path... assuming you're paying attention to your surroundings to notice them.
The Buckyball Racing Club once held a
race involving trading in the Type-X ships, some of the most slow turning ships in the game...including Type-9's. Some of the travel times between stations, including docking, trading,
and undocking, were below four minutes the Type-9. Granted, I'm nowhere near that good, but still there's a rather large gap between how the regular player engages with Supercruise, and the type of experience Supercruise regularly provides hands on and attentive players.
And to bring this back around to Star Citizen, the space experience SC provides is why it'll probably never be as engaging as other games in my library. Even Space Engineers, a game that tends to drain all my enthusiasm for playing once I reach space and start searching for uranium and platinum, has more engaging space travel than what SC provides. Either game wouldn't be so bad if I could simply accelerate time, like I do in Kerbal Space Program, but both games insist that I have to be a passive passenger in my own ship for long periods of time, when what I
really want to do is be an active participant in the whole process.
