Tangentially related to the topic:
As to exploration being competitive, if it's tag stealing people are talking about, I can only say it has never, not once, happened to me that a system I scanned as undiscovered I didn't get first discovered by. If people are referring to the 'race' to Elite exploration rank, well that ship sailed a while back, and went up onto hydrofoils after 3.3. I got to Elite under the old system, with something over 300 million in exploration data (maybe less, was in July 2017). That took me seven exploration trips of generally two to four weeks each. Three short trips (about a week each) after the FSS was introduced netted me in excess of 500 million credits.
Oh, tag stealing has happened before the Codex, and with it, there's even more. There have been times where somebody would upload something of interest to EDSM, somebody else would find it when searching for something, they'd fly there, see there are no tags, and would get theirs there. There was at least one case in which somebody bragged about being the first to discover it. Then with the Codex, there are people now for who are actively looking for new entries there, to fly to and possibly nab. At least with third-party sites, you always had the choice not to upload before you sold, and now, finds before you last docked aren't made public; with the Codex, everything you scan gets uploaded and visible to all immediately.
So, if you care about tags in the system where you've found your stuff, it's best to drop everything and race to the nearest station.
In this sense, there is a bit of competition to exploration. Then there are also squadron leaderboards, which is actual competition... but what matters there by far the most are credits from exploration, for which the FSS is much better than the ADS ever would be.
All these debates about the FSS and its numerous shortcomings seem to miss a crucial point though:
body discovery isn't where exploration gameplay should be. No matter how you dress it up, at the end, it's only "scan the thing, sell the data for credits and faction influence". Frontier to date have been reluctant to add more interaction than that, with the sole exception being scanning spaceborne life for extra traits, which rewards you... nothing. The developers could have at least added some exploration gameplay to finding surface sites, but they have gone from a terrible system (having to eyeball it, and not even knowing if what you're looking for really might be there) to a slightly less terrible one (no exploration, all you need to do is pewpew a planet and then you no longer have to search at all for exact locations).
New content of the same type will only last for so long, and Frontier have barely provided any in the first place. We need more interactions, more reasons to head out there, and more involved ones than just clicking planets in a turret view. (At their cores, both the FSS and the DSS are this.) Ironically enough, the two best tools for exploration currently in the game are... the pulse scanner for mining, and the SRV scanner.
To me, arguing about whether the FSS or the ADS would be better feels like arguing over faeces or urine. If I had to pick one, I'd still pick the latter, but given an actual choice, I really would rather go with something else than those two.
The thing is though, there is plenty of appetite for would-be explorers to head out there, just little reason to do so. Take a look at DW2. Exploration activity was double during the expedition than what it has been after it ended, according to both in-game and EDSM data. Thanks to the roster and statistics, we know that there are literally thousands of players who would head out to explore again, if Frontier would give them good new reasons to do so. That was what the expedition did. It's what Frontier will need to do... assuming they'll care about how many people will be exploring, of course. (Certainly not before the New Era(TM).)
