Coming to this conversation somewhat late, but I think some of the ideas here are great and will add a degree of 'expedition management' for exploration, and at the same time we know that the whole reason for the current state of the profession is quite simply this: fdev wants to add a massive time sink so that the sparseness of content is less obvious. That notwithstanding this is an opportunity to still accomplish that objective AND add a true layer of depth to this gameplay. Taking some ideas from earlier here and putting them together of how this could be accomplished:
Current situation:
You can fire up the game as a new player, slap a fuel scoop, buy a G1 artemis and just head out into the black and it will be simply a function of time and repetition to gain ranks.
Suggested improvement:
Retain the above option to just bash into the gameplay like above, but doing so just makes your life harder and require more dogged persistence and luck because:
1. You can integrate engineering in a more meaningful way, like the ability to modify your backpack so you can have alternative/spare canisters to sample more than 1 specimen at a time, or special effects on the detailed surface scanner allowing greater discrete information (like being able to see different colorations of the same species with different colors/characteristics on the heatmap) creating an 'expedition preparation period' part of gameplay
2. Add inorganics like geological/atmospheric sampling (I know this fundamentally changes the term 'exobiologist' but think of it this way, biologists on earth also take into account the effects of the environment on the lifeform they are studying)
3. Add conditional divergence i.e. sampling from an equatorial desert of the planet yields a specific data point about the organic that is different from a sample from the polar icefield or subtropical mountains. You can still choose to landrover bash 1km at the same site locality to get your 3 samples of a particular plant on a particular planet, but it will be worth way less than if you choose to orbital hop from pole to pole, perhaps by an order of magnitude to make the while worth it, plus if you add easter egg like surprise characteristics that are only revealed by finding far flung divergence samples, you create a true sense of 'discovery' meaning that the same plants on different planets can be unique. This can use the procedural planet generation that currently exists already.
4. Completely studying a planet for the first time yields a unique tag, planet first cataloged and studied by RandomCMDR, bonus xp, and adds to a list of scientific accolades in the commander's logbook/stats. Just like Darwin was to the Galapagos, so RandomCMDR is to SYNUEFE 12-Y-GZ A8-B. This makes exobiology less of a game of how fast you can hop from planet to planet to molest every plant in sight and actually makes it worth the time to stay on a gem of a planet you found and spend the time to 'study' it. You don't need the 'first to catalog/study' tag for rank advancement counter I suggest in point 5 below, but having a first yields 2x the financial/xp reward like it does now on top of the accolade.
5. Complete study of a number of planets can be used to gate access to an official 'scientific community' wherein the player is granted a title (like Dr) that can be displayed and special modules accessible, and/or it can be the condition to get Elite in exobiology so that there is a certain value to the rank, and Dr RandomCMDR has a certain accomplishment to it.
All of this does not detract from the timesink nature of the profession, but instead of simply an empty timesink it is now viewed as accomplishment that takes time and effort
