Personally, I'm OK with long travel times, and after all there are relatively few occasions where you have to go more than a couple of thousand Ls from your arrival point unless you choose to (do read those mission details before you accept them).
On the other hand, I doubt that anyone has ever traveled 100,000 Ls and said to themselves, "Well, that was over far too soon! I quit!" But I can imagine people who are frustrated with the game for lots of reasons being pushed over the edge by ten idle minutes in supercruise.
So my expectation is that long travel times are a net negative for player retention, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the New Era saw travel times reduced: I did wonder whether our glimpse of the Orthrus was intended to foreshadow the adoption of Thargoid technology to achieve this.
I actually enjoyed finding planets by eyeball and parallax. Bloody scanners. Back I my day....