Five items per node instead of three? Six? I remember when all this were fields as far as the eye could see, and you got
one material per drop just as the Good Lord intended.
Arguably it should still be one per drop (the graphic is of a single
thingy, not three
thingies joined together) but with a larger (maybe even random
) number of drops per wreck or drops per USS. But then the game might run up against some sort of object limit if every exploding ship in an instance was dropping enough hardware to fill Watto's junkyard.
It's all a conceit anyway. Let's be honest, what we're doing when we're Engineering is collecting power runes and transmogrification spells and unicorn dung to take to the Master Wizard so they can turn our basic sword into a +10 Dragonwhacker. These mechanics are fine for fantasy realms but trying to cover them with a hard SF technological re-skin was never going to work without leaving gaping holes in the logic.
If a developer releases a patch for
Dragonwhackers of K'thaaaal that makes a faerie mushroom drop five elfingems instead of three when I smite it, I won't be too inclined to worry about the physics as long as it improves my gameplay. When FD decides that every component dropped from a destroyed ship will now contain three times the amount of usefulness in the same physical package, it just serves to underscore how arbitrary it all is. Progression is faster and less frustrating, but harder to reconcile with the setting. Which is probably a price worth paying if you're only interested in the end goal of getting the modifications, but more of an ask if you're trying to buy into the journey.
I really wish FD had come up with an original progression method more in keeping with
Elite's semi-realistic setting and not simply re-skinned a fantasy MMO mechanic. Even something more akin to a 4X technology tree might have worked better, such that modifications to certain ship characteristics would open up further options along those branches while cutting off others. It's likely that metas would still have emerged for things like extreme exploration range or PVP, but we might also have seen a more interesting variety of ship characteristics among the mainstream.
As others have said, Engineering is basically just Grade AA once you hit the G5 maxima. It just takes longer.