The VIP passenger missions are reasonable for a number of reasons.
1. Passenger ships like Orca and Beluga Liners that can stack multiple luxury/first class cabins have a decent advantage in credits/hour over other ships.
2. If you get a fine leaving the station, get scanned by police or pirates, take even 1 hull damage, heck, even get rammed by police while leaving/entering the station, you risk losing multiple passengers, dramatically reducing credits/hour. I've even had an instance where a ship literally jumped into my path while boosting into the station, and got a murder charge and the loss of my beluga liner and all it's passengers.
3. It's not brainless easy to do the above while flying massive ships like the Anaconda/Beluga Liner/Cutter. It actually involves a little gameplay.
4. People don't earn anywhere close to the amount of credits carrying bulk passengers from to Smeaton. The most I've earned is 65m credits/hour, but that is in an 200m Beluga liner with expensive A-drives and luxury cabins. Considering the grind required just to afford a big ship, as well as the actual cost of an A-specced big 3 ship, 12 hours running passengers to barely afford 1 big ship doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
5. Even with that awesome A-specced ship, you still die within seconds to a fully engineered ship. The real grind now is the engineers. You can't expect people to spend months grinding up to an A-spec Anaconda and then years grinding up to an engineered ship to even compete in open play.
6. If they spent all that time to grind up to an A-specced god-rolled ship just so they could sit in Maia and kill T-7 pve traders and get bored and scream "no meaningful content", then the joke's on them, because they could have done that in a 40m Clipper in the first week of playing.
)
