Just to share my point of view: I would not mind the looking left approach if my currently selected target would be also autofocused in the list on the panel. Which is not (what???). So I am scrolling up or down for no other reason than FDev programming laziness (or they just don't care or want to make me suffer more). The current game mechanics implementation is simply not logical and it is not user friendly: it is actually user unfriendly, if anything, especially on console.I used to agree with this, but having gotten back into playing and done some racing with friends I can say that needing to go through the minor effort of looking left to activate it isn't a bad thing. Its an easy habit to get into and it keeps what is probably well more than 80% of the gameplay (docking and traveling) from becoming overly automated.
Im not against it having a hot key though considering it would cause more people to use it passivly and the fact that it can more than quadruple travel times when done that way I can only see it leading to more people complaining about travel times.