I think you both missed my point - I understand the status quo, and how to work around it, but I don't understand why it has been done like this. What possible purpose does a very limited FSD range have apart from to waste my time when I'm trying to get somewhere?
Because it's about
trade-offs.
You, as pilot, have to make decisions about outfitting your ship based on your preferences. There is no such thing as "the best ship" for exactly this reason, and that's why Frontier could never make one. A ship that is good at everything would be good for nothing. If all the ships linearly became better as they became more expensive, there would be no point in having more than one class of ship. Just have "a ship" that you get when you start the game, and as you get more credits you can upgrade every component to make it faster. And sure, that is a mechanic that could work--but it's not that interesting, and I'm glad the game is not that way.
Instead we're forced to think about what we want from our ships. Do we want speed, or combat? Do we want to spend those extra 500,000 credits on the A-class, or can we settle for a B-class until we make a little more money?
I'm reiterating this for the benefit of the larger audience of the thread here, though. I think you agree with me on the above, but you just disagree that the process of
jumping really needs to be this tedious. Fair enough. But....
Edit: For clarity, 36 jumps to get from one place to another inside human occupied space is a royal waste of time (this was my journey today to get to Ceos). The end result is that most ships bar an Asp and an Anaconda will become too tedious to use unless you stick to your local area. That seems like a shame to me, and an unnecessary one as it doesn't bring any positives with it.
Here's the thing: space is big. Hugely, mindbogglingly, ridiculously big.
You might think it's a long walk to the chemist's, but that's peanuts compared to space.
Elite Dangerous might have its issues, but one thing it does gloriously is capturing the scale and magnitude of space and space travel. The lengthy time it takes to jump across volumes of space is an integral part of that.
You are making an assumption that most players should be criss-crossing the Bubble, maybe even the galaxy, on a regular basis. And, fair enough, some players enjoy doing it this way (I am actually one of them as well, but then again, I rock that Asp). Some players, though, are content to spend a great deal of time in a small volume of space, travelling between a few systems tens of light-years away, tops, while they do Powerplay or bounty hunting or trading or whatever it is people do to make money that doesn't involve staring at pretty planets all day.
It's harder to go from your home to a destination halfway around the world than it is to simply travel across your city. Travel gets harder the farther away you're going: you have to plan more, both in terms of costs (how much it will take to get there) and logistics (the route/method you're going to take).
Jump range is a way of implementing this idea. Travelling to nearby stars is cheap and nearly instantaneous. But, yes, if you're travelling a few hundred light-years, then that is a significant undertaking, and the cost of travelling should represent that. If it were otherwise, if we shrank all the effective distances, we would undermine this vision of the galaxy as the big place it is. There would be no difference between going from Sol to Achenar or from Sol to Proxima Centauri--so why do it at all?
