For any individual involved - provided it's not a result of an actual bug like the data duplication - no, of course not. There should at least be some short-term benefit to someone finding a good option!
The problem is more for game balance more widely.
- all ways of merit earning should be roughly balanced against each other at the top end: it shouldn't be "rares or nothing" if you just want to make lots of merits quickly - though in any particular system, one might be better than another today because of what stations there are, or what mining opportunities, or what BGS states, etc.
- if you have an activity where the "normal" way of doing it is very slow compared with the "quick" way of doing it, that creates a balance problem for the activity.
So for example from the escape pods activity instead:
- blowing up passenger ships at an Anarchy tourist beacon is a much quicker (and consequence-free) way to get escape pods than hunting round a few signal sources at once
- so "balance to the top end" says that escape pods should be worth very little individually, because you can obtain them hundreds at a time
- but almost no systems have Anarchy government and a tourist beacon, so that means that in almost all cases escape pods aren't worth the effort of picking up
For escape pods to be possible to balance with the rest, therefore, that super-fast activity needs to be prevented/slowed down/something so that it's not so out of line. Or alternatively that sort of number of escape pods needs to be available much more generally rather than every salvage signal source just having 5 or so.
So the same with rares: if they balance rares to the rate a carrier can achieve and that's 3 times better than with a normal ship (which doesn't seem at all implausible looking at the tripling of the mean delivery in rare goods CGs after carriers were introduced), the per-tonne payout ends up potentially so small that rares are perfectly competitive if you use a carrier well but essentially worthless if you don't.
