Chiming in:
If you play in Open the correct "winning" assumption is that the people that are likely to kill you are likely to have all the toys, by any means nessesary. I personally prefer Open play, I dont find the NPC's challenging unless theres a ton of anaconda's/gunships/ or the infamous railgun aimbot asps.
If you play in Solo/Private group the game is very much your game, there is much less competition with players who will kill you stone cold dead if you misstep.
Now as a sense of "justification" if Open players wish to stay in Open: Every facet of the game that is useful without using an outside hack or cheat is legal, including menu game mode swapping. Simply put: the requirement is "Play to Win" and nothing less.
However as a purist gameplayer some missions themselves do not lend themselves to cohesive/logical gameplay from a reward stand point.
All mission players assess missions on two values: Time Cost and Reward, if the mission serves as a stepping stone, one part can be less than optimal for time cost/reward and if both are good the missions are taken, if one is bad (or an alternative is better), then the mission is not taken. This process can take place on a single mission board, after experience with "menu swapping" or between systems and states.
General Mission breakdown atm:
Longer multipart multipart missions are just bad, for cash/reward/fun, id like them to be fun but they arent.
Some mission types are terrible (looking at you covert aquisition, although these might improve with the hatchbreaker limpet change, heres hoping)
Some missions get to a specific reward very efficiently at the cost of monetary reward (data delivery etc), for rank.
Super Power standing is barely affected by missions.
Without the menu swapping there would be different "centres" for missions based on system state/economy configurations that give a lot of missions or of the reward required.
In short, if the mission board changed, the "mission meta" would change, and perhaps that would slow progress. Do I have the right to lobby or complain that the mission giving needs revission to a better game after we have been in the game using these "tricks" for long periods? Hell No, so we keep quiet.
I would personally rather mission types and rewards had a whole work through so that menu swapping wasnt required and that significantly more challenging missions spawned in relation to a players progress. This might be a symptom of the "glut" of missions or that they arent player centric or a number of smaller factors all added up. I don't envy the mission guy at FDev.
Honestly overall considering the size and scope of the BGS/galaxy and the mission system itself. The missions are not at all bad, but because the missions easily polarise themselves from a player perspective it seems "bad" because once you get to see a few boards and know what you want, every mission is "bad" unless it is a 2 for 1 or highly rewarding, thats just a standard way of playing to win or playing for most reward for your time.
The bits that I do play for fun generally involve a community effort, as I find getting other players to move up in Elite more rewarding than my own fortune.
I can see that there is scope for "self story telling" within Elite, but I personally find the best stories we have are with or against other players.
One of the main things that could be improved would be "wing missions" and the incentive to play with other players, escort and carry, recon and insertion, capture and hold, serve and protect, "run rabbit run", a cop chase, being the guy with the "case", close range planetary find and recover and 20 other different scenerios.
As a standard rule I will not do something for a mission unless it is a 2 for 1 or going somewhere with a large pay off under almost any circumstance.
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