500--1000LY is a long way to go. Exploration is only nice in theory:
First you need to get lots of money to get a decent ship to use for exploring. Then you need to do a lot of engineering to increase the pathic jump range. Then you need to go get at least a Guardian FSD to increase the still pathetic jump range, and even though the jump range is better than it was, it remains pathetic. It remains particularly pathetic on a ship you might want to use for combat, so that's kinda boring because you're stuck in the system you happend to be in and those that are one jump away. Maybe a community event comes up and you might want to go there to do some combat, but it's just too far away. By the time you have done all that, you're not really interested in exploring anymore because you have explored a lot of systems others have already explored before you, but yet you needed to do it again for some reason. You may have already mapped a planet that hasn't been mapped already because you had to jump thousands of LYs all over the galaxy to some remote location where you were told you could make money by mining and back to some place that hopefully pays a decent price for the few minerals you got. You can't even take a break because if you get logged out, when you come back you end up somewhere close to where you were rather than were you were, and now NPC pirates show up when go back into the ring and shoot out down because you now have some cargo, and there's nothing you could do about it. Next time you go back to that place to make some more money, you find that the developers have broken mining even more such that there aren't any of the minerals you wanted to mine around. At that point you're basically done with mining, too, because it just sucks. If you're lucky, you happened to get enough money to do other things, like engineering, but they all turn out to suck badly one way or another.
And if you do explore, you are forced to use the system scanner, which is a stupid and repetetive task that is better left to a computer. The scanner is a pain to use with a HOTAS and still awful to use with the xbox controller --- and do you really want to look at every irrelevant rocky body and gas giant? What for? I certainly don't. Why isn't the scanning process automated and instead only points out those bodies that may be of interest to you, like ones that might be worthwhile to do a surface scan on because they might yield valuable map data?
I just can't be bothered to go exploring after all that. Why would I? It's just another thing that's wrong in this game, like so many other things. Then after all that painful struggle, a community event comes up which isn't too far away and could be some fun to do some combat, but since the event is so badly made, there is not combat to be found. And that point, I quit playing because it just sucks --- and not for the first time.
So yeah, go exploring if you want to. I can't be bothered anymore. That is how this game goes. Sure you could go exploring, by all means, because in theory, it sounds fun --- but it isn't. You might discover more irrelvant rocky bodies and gas giants like the hundreds or thousands you have "discovered" before when you tried to get to the point where you could go exploring.
I don't know anyone who is not ahead of me. And what does it matter. Someone who isn't ahead might not be able to help me with what I'm trying to do because they don't know any more than I do.
What's the signifance of Hutton Orbital? I've traded rare goods and they didn't yield any unusual profits. Flying long distances means I have the throttle on full because supercruise doesn't let me go at maximum speed, and I tend to fall asleep in my chair and miss the moment in which I need to take the throttle back so I don't overshoot the target. And/or I switch the monitor from the xbox to the computer and do something else while waiting to arrive. The long flight also means there isn't much profit to be made because the flight takes so much time.
65000LY means at least 1300 jumps. I'm not gona torture myself like that, especially not just to be able to say I've been there.
50000LY means at least 1000 jumps. I'm not going to go to such lengths just to pin more blueprints. I don't know how about neutron stars other than that they are very dangerous and that I better don't don't go there.
Powerplay seems just another grind, so why not avoid it? I don't see any point in avoiding it if it allows me to get something useful, either. And yes, it seems that the shields are the only really useful item you can get from powerplay. But I can't really tell because I can't be bothered to grind so much as to get all items that there are in order to compare them myself.
And what's the point of powerplay anyway other than that? I didn't even know that I needed to sign up for it if I hadn't happened to watch a video about getting the shields.
Here's another example: The first or one of the first engineers requires meta alloys. You can travel the galaxy for a 100 or a 1000 lifetimes or more and you may still never find any. How much fun is that? I don't want to have to read everthing instead of playing. But you have to spend more time reading and searching for information than you can spend playing. How much is fun is that?
So where is the fun in ED? Lowering prices for some minerals to begin with and adjust other prices or rewards is not going to make it fun. Fixing all the issues might, and then it won't matter if doing one thing pays more than doing another.
S