I'm with the OP on this -- fuel costs were insane, but now they're negligible, same with repairs. I want my repair bill to remind me to be more careful with my ship, and my fuel estimates to make me really feel the savings adding up everytime I scoop.
Now, scooping's no timesink, unless you seriously need to gas up and got a scoop a bit too small for the task. I scoop when I'm scanning a star and looking at the system map to see what's worth a detailed scan. I scoop when flying past a star to get to something on the other side of it. I accidentally scoop when trying to turn away to a destination station. Owning a scoop means a lot of little sips of free fuel with no real effort, unless one is out in the black and needs to stop at a star for gas instead of topping up at a station. And let us not forget the scales in play. If fuel were to cost 250 credits a ton, then it would be 500 to fill a sidey up from empty (or 1k, I forget if it's a 2 or 4 ton tank). A newbie will feel that, but very quickly overcome it, likely before they've even burnt that much fuel in the first place. Multiply that by 32 for a 'conda or an asp that likes more reliable jump distance and you're paying 8k for a full tank -- more than just a few k, but far under a mil. That amount of cash is trivial to a player with enough credits for such ships, but enough to feel, so that the savings from a scoop are palpable, and the refuel button stops being such an automatic thing. Tie it to local hydrogen prices and gas gets cheaper for starting players out at LHS 3447 and the Sol neighborhood, but wiggles around a bit, adding a bit more interesting texture to the galaxy.
For repairs, I feel like if I tear my 1.5mil advanced discovery scanner right apart via stupidity, I should have to pay at least something near its part of my rebuy cost. 75k for 5%, or perhaps slightly lower, say the 3% rate backers get for insurance, would be a good repair baseline, so if I completely destroy it, it's still 45k to fix. It'd just be more reasonable for repair fees to be at least somewhere near the part's insurance re-buy cost (though never above it, then we we wind up with self-destruct insurance fraud), such that getting my poor cobra down to 1% by fighting like a doofus should cost me over 8k for the hull repair alone. It's not unreasonable, I can easilly come up with that much, but it's not so trivial that I can ignore it.
That was a wall of text, but TL;DR: You don't have to make costs grindy to make them meaningful. There exists a zone between outrageous and trivial that scales the same for all ships. I'd recomend visiting it.
