Plenty of people also went out on DW2 as the last chance of giving the new mechanic(s) a go, and then left. Even among those who stayed, many of the "top" explorers seem to explore considerably less these days than they used to.
Oh, but it
has gone down in a very significant manner. You see, DW2 brought thousands of players to exploration, and doubled (or in some statistics, tripled) previous activity. Honestly, it all was a golden opportunity for Frontier. Yet after the expedition was over, all of those gains, and the gains from the Chapter Four: gone. I guess it's a consolation prize that at least it has not gone well below pre-Chapter Four levels, but personally, I wouldn't count that as a huge success.
There are two possibilities:
1. A lot of people stopped exploring after Chapter Four, and the same amount of new people continued exploring after DW2, balancing it out
2. Not a lot of people stopped exploring after Chapter Four, and a lot of the new people stopped exploring after DW2, balancing it out
We can't tell those two apart well enough, unfortunately. But I think it's quite telling if you go see how many of DW2's organizers still explore, and what the
official ending statement and whether there will be a DW3 was. Of course, it was worded very carefully, because I believe they didn't want to offend Frontier and risk not getting as much official support for a possible next expedition as the lot they received for DW2. But otherwise, a lot of people out on DW2 said that while FD's manual support (building the stations) was great, the
exploration part turned out to be quite the disappointment. The new mechanics, well, they certainly weren't enough to sustain interest on their own, and as for the promised new content, breadcrumbs and whatnot, I believe that the list of entirely new things (not molluscs of a different colour and slightly tweaked shape) added by Chapter Four and discovered by the thousands of players on the expedition speaks for itself:
That's it.
Let's just say that's not what the vast majority of people expected.
Oh, and about "players spending more time in systems then before": there's no proof that players are spending more time in systems than they did before, but there is proof that they spend less time using the FSS than they did before.
Anyway, back to the FSS then:
Well, yes. There is no possibility of failure with the FSS, and the only reward for improving your "skill" with it is that you might shave a few seconds off of the time required to complete the minigame.
Your comment about promotion was bang on. It's worth rewatching the developers' stream about it too, seeing what they focused on, how they all played and presented it, the level of enthusiasm, and so on. That's what matters the most, not what some players think about it. I mean, the most common pro-FSS argument that doesn't involve rewards and making things easier is that it gave something to do, and where the bar for quality is varies from person to person. So it's good to consider what the developers who had to present it seem to think and feel about it.
