The original vision was for microjumps not supercruise, though. Supercruise as the sole means of in-system travel wasn't fully confirmed until the Alpha releases - prior to that Frontier's last comments had been that a supercruise/microjump hybrid was most likely. Lots of places - nav beacons, really distant stations, the pre-3.3 behaviour of supercruise signal sources, etc. showed obvious signs of being designed for a microjumps world and not being rewritten after the last minute switch.
Supercruise times never bothered me, and clearly don't really bother most players. ED is a simulator, after all, not an arcade game. (Ok, it's perhaps a bit of a mix between the two, but there's a quite heavy emphasis on the simulation side.) Things take time in a simulation. Traveling to places takes time, and that's ok.
Subverting supercruise traveling times is a bold move, but they are approaching it surprisingly well: Yes, you can speed it up, but at a cost. And it feels really cool (pretty much everybody who tries it for the first time are like "woah!!!") It's hard to hate it, even for a hardcore "this is a simulation, there mustn't be stupid shortcuts!" player. Of course there will always be haters (there's absolutely nothing that Fdev can do that won't cause some people to complain), but for the most part this has been a really ingenious way to change supercruising. Could have been much, much worse. A+
