Hello Commanders!
First, apologies, I've only read the initial post. The suggestions made are completely reasonable, so this should be in no way taken as any kind of, "you're way wrong, man!"
For us, the problem with the suggested system (and we got a lot of really great feedback from our backers on this, that basically made us take a good look in the mirror and "man up and go for it"), is that it doesn't really feel like you travel (we had a jump system way back when during production, and it very much did dilute the feeling of scale in the game).
It also felt contrived to have most gameplay happening not too far from a starport.
Basically, we'd gone to all these lengths to create a gigantic game world and it just didn't feel right to not support and reinforce the idea that you travelled incredible distance across the vast reaches of space in it. I'll admit it was a risky choice - it's more difficult to support and perhaps not as instantly accessible, but we think it's the right choice and worth fighting for.
On the other hand, we're certainly not finished with super cruise. There's clearly room for improvement, and I'm really happy that this game has continuing ongoing development, so we can make stuff better and better!
We definitely want to add a micro jump between stars within a system (not only does this fit in with the context of how the frame shift drive uses large bodies for navigation, it also helps significantly with those systems where you currently arrive around the "wrong" star, where civilisation has set up camp around a different star in the system).
We're also going to look at getting more content directly into super cruise (e.g. having ships you're looking for in super cruise as well as at signal sources, making super cruise traffic and behaviour more supportive of system state), as well as making more of signal sources (we're looking at adding more reasons to visit signal sources and this will hopefully just grow over time).
The usual caveats apply, of course - no ETA, no guarantee (development can be difficult to predict).
Of course, this still won't be everyone's cup of tea, and I'll take no offence if you don't get excited by the direction we're taking. I hope however, that this will help explain a little how and why we make decisions for the game.