I feel that the mechanics in place for the engineers, may be more fun for players who are just starting out. I found it frustrating to actively search for micro resources but it feels rewarding if you stumble across them.
My advice would be to carry on doing what you enjoy and simply treat them as added optional 'spice'
Gonna add my voice to what others already said, and say this doesn't work. I first started out doing this, and what I got was hundreds of materials I couldn't use for pretty much anything except a few (not even all) of the grade 1 upgrades. So if you want the upgrades you actually can't just do what you enjoy best. And that would normally be fine, pushing people out of their comfort zones. But not with how grindy, tedious and time consuming it is. Here's my experience so far.
You cannot get anything past that by randomly trying to get materials as you come across them. You won't get polonium except if the RNG decides you get one as a mission reward. You won't get wake scans if you do not go out of your way and build a wake scanner ship unless the RNG decides you get one as a mission reward.
So you start to think that if you just go and do the suggested activities to get the materials, since mission rewards are totally random, you'll be rewarded with them. So if I need chemical processors, I guess I should hunt hauling ships. So I go do that and discover that it's a double stuffed layer of RNG - I need an instance that gives me haulers, and I need that hauler to drop what I need. But ok, I preservere, and eventually get a few processors. By this point it's been about an hour in and I've covered 25% of a blueprints' requirements.
So I estimate that all going this poorly I should at worst expect a grade 3 upgrade every 4 in game hours. Daunting to say the least.
I got a few engineers to grade 5 and I got two FSD grade 5 upgrades. I had a spreadsheet of the local systems and what they dropped that I did out of fun during 2.0, and while building it I got adept at the wave scanner and driving the srv. Because I consider the FSD upgrade an anti-tedium upgrade, I want it on all my ships. So I went out for some more polonium. And 5 in game hours later I am 3 polonium richer. It was at this point I gave up.
There's almost no skill involved in collecting these mats. The mats that required the most in my experience were the military ones - flying, killing and surviving in a combat zone while scooping. Everything else is just doing something that involves a whole lot of zero gameplay, a ton of downtime, and hoping the RNG decides you deserve your bi-hourly polonium.
-
The problem as I see it can be illustrated by comparing Engineers to Diablo 3 and its crafting system and drop system. In that game, you accumulate crafting materials by playing the game. You can't miss them, quite literally. Playing more of course results in more materials. However there you don't just get crafting materials to upgrade your vendor sword, you also want the legendary weapons and armor that you can only obtain by playing. It's still RNG and the drop rates are even lower than the ridiculous that is the polonium drop rate here, but the way they've avoided making it unfun is that you progress as you're doing it - you may not get the amazing weapon you wanted, or it may not have dropped the stats you wanted, but you gained money, avatar experience, collected other pieces of loot that you can trade and had fun with three other humans - and you roll the die extremely often at the high end, giving you a motivation to progress with your character and making them more efficient.
The crafting materials and system are where the clearest comparison can be made between that game and this one. Once you have your imperfect legendary weapon or armor you approach the enchantress and select just one of the item's many properties to reroll a stat on, keeping everything else the same. Each reroll will have a material cost associated, and you can keep the original roll or choose a new one out of the 4 or so possibilities. So unless you had the godliest, best possible drop originally, being able to tweak your gear won't eliminate your quest for finding the same item but better, because there can be as many as 9 other properties you could not touch. Thus the player's motivation remains intact.
Hunting for polonium is none of that, it's just anti-progress every session it doesn't drop. With how long anything and everything takes, only at the end to get awful results ends just being demotivating. It's quite impressive really how the same system in two games results in really different player experiences.
-
The way I would fix it without remaking the entire system would be to drastically improve drop rates on the lower end - if polonium, going by another thread's figures, has about a 1% drop rate, I'd increase that to somewhere between a 25-50% drop rate. Failing that I would make rocks spawn on planets a lot more densely, so you can roll the die more often.
If I had my way, I would make everything take some degree of skill to gather, the more skill required for the rarer items. Time isn't skill.
Sorry that this turned into a bit of a rant
Edit: Since we're doing game features we use or not:
1.1 CG - Nope
1.2 Wings - All the time, if only they worked properly
1.3 PP - Was how I originally made vast riches, didn't use it for its intended purpose apart from that tho. Now I use it if/when I need a module for some ship I'm using.
1.4 CQC - I used it as often as I could, if only it wasn't severly lacking in features, it would be what I would play the most
1.5 Ships - Got them all, cool additions overall
2.0 Planetary landings - Very fun, brought the game closer to Elite 2 and expanded on it, it's just fun if totally pointless for progression. Being forced to do it in the way I described it earlier killed it for me however.
2.1 Engineers - Needs tweaking urgently, would use it constantly after said tweaking
