There actually is a precedent--after the Damnation's fiasco in HIP 22460 there were these big debris fields with tons and tons of up to grade 3 (IIRC) materials laying about. Only problem: whenever you dropped in them 60 seconds later a bunch of very angry Thargoids warped in and whooped your Asp... I would really, really like to see these debris fields with some occasional pirates/scavengers in the Bubble, for example after a war has finished in a system. I think at one point there were some debris fields with pirate spawns in some systems, but they only had few materials and low value commodities/salvage to collect. Haven't seen them for a few years, though.
These were really cool and you could even get ancient keys from them rarely.
Sometimes I wonder how many ships do you people engineer?
Do you all have 8 corvettes each with 8 skill boosters or what?
From inara I have 120 ships with ~90 engineered FSDs which most likely have all their other modules fully engineered too (rest being module storage or event-discount hulls not yet engineered).
Only 3 vettes, but 8 anacondas, 3-4 of which are hulltanks without 8 boosters. Probably around 150 total shield boosters/hd hull reinforcements engineered each which does mean thousands of G4-G5 materials spent on just for those recipes.
Wouldn't making mats much easier to come by, or even make engineered modules buyable for credits result in being able to get anything right away, instead of having to make priorities as to what ship to get and how to engineer it? I did feel a certain amount of accomplishment once I added the 8th engineered skill booster to my corvette.
The game as it is doesn't encourage moderation in engineering in any way due to front loading the negatives on engineering grades and not having ways to reliably encounter easier enemies you can take on solo.
It would be better if it did that and that's part of why I suggested setting a lower cap for engineering materials too so you can't grind as much before being forced to go spend it.
Not having loadouts and having those slow animations uninstalling weapons and overall an UI so slow to navigate that there's multiple tools to design your ships out of game before you build them also encourages engineering multiple ships just to not deal with that crap.
Collecting materials at crystal shard sites, or collecting mats from bounty hunting, or mission rewards is all as natural gameplay as anything else.in the game. These are all gameplay activities devised for players. No different than finding specific mining hotspots, searching for exobiology samples 30,000 Ly from the bubble, or visiting an ancient guardian site.
Going 1000Ly out of the bubble isn't normal gameplay, especially when the crystal shard sites weren't really known about until a while after the FSS/Codex updates which allowed people to discover them. They were a happy accident and not an intentional part of the design of material gathering.
The crystal shard sites are cool, but visiting them always feels very game-y to me - I actually liked driving the SRV around planets looking for outcrops and such even though it was hellishly slow and is probably even worse in odyssey.