The core problem with Firmware mats of any kind is this: their effective drop rate is far beyond Very Rare in comparison to any other piece of data of equivalent listed rarity. The reason for that is the amount of time it takes to get one "roll" against the loot table compared to... well, almost anything else in the game. And you can only make that roll once per data point, ever.
Consider: it takes seconds to scan a ship in SC, or a wake with the appropriate scanner. NPCs can be killed in a few minutes, if not faster. Mining an asteroid is extremely quick with prospectors and C2 mining lasers. Each of those actions is one or more rolls against that entity's loot table, each of which is a chance to get the particular kind of mats that come from that particular entity. And each of those is an effectively infinitely renewable resource, for reasons too obvious to belabor.
Each data point, though, involves a base assault. Some of those are relatively easy. Most are not. And as mentioned above, each one can only be scanned once, ever--once you've scanned a given data point, it will not allow you to scan it again. Which means that the total time it takes to get one "roll" against its loot table needs to account for the time it takes to travel to a different settlement--at least a few minutes, if the settlement is on the same planet, let alone if you have to travel to a different planet or even system. Each of these is, in effect, a unique "mob" that never respawns. Unless that changes, that means there is a finite number of these that any player will ever be able to collect from a base in their entire career--and the more bases they assault, the harder it's going to get to keep track of which ones you've already been to.
I'm not including USS and mission rewards as a source of Firmware for the purposes of drop rate for two reasons. The first is that any mat seems to be a potential mission reward. The second is that USS are actually an extremely unreliable and infrequent source of these, because they only seem to drop from Personal Data Points--which not only aren't always in Degraded or Encoded SS, they also can potentially drop a wide variety of data mats other than Firmware.
FDev, please rethink your approach to acquiring Firmware mats. The above makes their effective drop rate for a given amount of time spent completely broken compared to anything else in the game.