Many peeps here grew up with the old elite
There's probably not a direct connection, though.
In the original Elite, you could fully-equip your Cobra - at least with all the equipment you were going to find useful - for about 15,000 credits, and a max-profit trade run could gain you 1,000 credits. So if you knew what you were doing (especially: how to dock!), and noting that your first couple of trade runs weren't going to be max-profit, you could be in a fully-equipped ship in 20 runs, which would take about 2 hours if you did them in safe systems. Consumables did cost a lot more than in Elite Dangerous there, but it still was very straightforward to make enough to cover them in normal play.
In FE2/FFE grinding out a semi-optimal but completely safe trade route could get you into the Panther Clipper with enough money to fit it out however you wanted in 4 hours. (Hellishly un-fun, do not recommend it, once you've upgraded to an Adder the money will roll in fast enough anyway doing less optimal stuff)
No-one
did at the time, not the first time anyway, because without the internet to share and refine strategies, you generally had to go through the "learn what works" part of the process yourself, and that would take days or weeks. But equally, people played these games for years and definitely knew what they were doing by then. The majority of the time was spent flying the ships, not building them.
Even leaving out that in Elite Dangerous you can own multiple ships, I think there are very few ship builds where even someone speed-running it could start with a new account and have a single ship built
and engineered in four hours. Building up a full "one of everything" fleet + suit collection would take hundreds of hours even done at maximum speed. And on the one hand, that's good for people who like building up stuff and/or have trouble setting their own goals or playing without one, but on the other hand it's a lot of work in the cases where the activity you do to earn a ship/suit/module isn't the same as the activity you use it for, and you only find one of those fun.
...and I think that's actually where the issue arises. In the first three games, every activity gave you credits (at greater or lesser rates, sure) and every upgrade was purchasable with credits, so you did what you found fun and gradually got an income stream from it to spend on stuff, usually in a way that got at least somewhat more efficient as you went along. With Elite Dangerous, any individual activity gives you credits and a defined subset of engineering materials, which are not necessarily the engineering materials needed to progress further in that activity. That's fine if you like all (or at least most) of the activities and considerably less good if not.
Odyssey did improve on this somewhat: almost all useful materials are available as mission rewards ... though not from exobiology or combat zones ... but also inter-player trading can let people swap materials about. Bringing that in for the ship engineering materials as well would probably be a big boost.
As far as the generational stereotyping goes, I see plenty of people my age and older complaining about the grind because "we have jobs and families now, not like these teenagers and students who can afford to play for hours a day". There certainly are plenty of opinions with a strong age correlation, but "do you prefer a game where the majority of time is in the building-up phase or in the using-the-things-you've-built phase" doesn't seem to be one of them.
