Finally! Someone who can answer a question without getting defensive and snarky!
Thank you so much for taking the time to type that out, I think i now have a better understanding of the income disparity.
So, given that you have clearly done both professions to reasonable degree, would you say that the payouts between the two (given risk/capital investment and time) are fair and equitable in your opinion?
On paper, yes, but there are some stumbling blocks in the execution that is hampering it. On the one hand, it DOES depressingly mirror life, where often the 'financially solid' approach isn't exactly going to be the exciting one, (not every good musician gets to be a rock star, whereas many good accountants will get a solid job) You should also keep in mind that, as mentioned before, what you're seeing in terms of my 210k credits in ten minutes is the culmination of lots of scouting, comparing prices, and trying to predict how the surrounding economy is going to function, and the biggest weakness that bounty hunting faces is that it's very 'Hand To Mouth.' You having a metric ton of success yesterday in terms of pirate killing isn't likely to have a tangible benefit today, whereas my success in securing a new trading route yesterday will last me for a very long time. Still, if I'd gotten killed even once in the first eight flights (wouldn't even have had to be THAT skilled an attacker, given how bargain basement my modules were,) I likely would have ended up having to sell my freighter and go back to bounty hunting, with a million credits gone just like that. Not to toot my own horn, but I'd like to think that the convenience and efficiency of my route, if not the base profit, is a bit above average. ^^ Finally while the purpose of being a skilled Bounty Hunter comes down largely to making other ships explode, the job of a trader is, LITERALLY, to make money, so it making more money, to some extent, than a bounty hunter is inevitable.
The sheer size of that gap, however, brings us to the stumbling blocks, which in no small part have to do with the size of the map. First, the risk of running into another player is minimal outside of the core, and players current are the only REAL threat. While I wouldn't want to deal with an NPC in my Type 6, I'd MUCH rather that than a player of any skill level in a Viper or Cobra. I've blown up enough Type 6 ships to know it isn't that difficult to accomplish.
It also helps that my route is, I believe, a bit distant from the player base, because given there's a preferential bias for the Empire, I opted to go in the opposite direction. Not only does this mean I'm less likely to be ganked, (and I can uuuusually evade NPC Interdictions, knock on wood,) it also means that instead of having dozens or hundreds of players chipping away at my station's demand for the product I ship by supplying it en masse, I get hundreds of thousands of units in supply/demand all to myself, for now at least, because there aren't many, if any, other players eating it up. So rather than having a brief, but profitable run after which I must inevitably move on to greener pastures, I can (and therefore, obviously, am, cause goddamnit I want a Python too,) just squat in the same two systems and do the same trade potentially hundreds of times before the profit margin dips too much.
I also get the impression that the idea is things should be more, well, challenging for traders, encouraging us to (whenever they make this a feature, if it isn't one already,) spend money hiring escort ships, thus cutting into the margins a bit more, and it's possible NPCs will increase in difficulty (at least in terms of interdiction frequency/skill) to make up for a spread out player base. Doesn't have a super large effect on those with near-to-sun routes like myself, but on traders relying on stations even a couple thousand light seconds from the sun, it could give pause to the thought of going unguarded.
So, short answer is I DO think that traders should be making more money than the other professions, because it's literally about spread sheets and profit. And I do think that those who have the patience, fortitude and stubborness to root out exceptional routes should be rewarded accordingly, i.e. make lots of money by even regular Trader status. However, I do think there are a lot of pockets where a Trader's 'seek out profit' quest will rapidly dissolve into 'Repeat Same Route Ad Nauseum,' and that Bounty Hunting's somewhat Spin The Wheel approach to potential income should be, if nothing else, given some more spikes to compensate for the inevitable slumps.
Honestly man, I'd recommend you get a Type 6. xD About a million to buy the ship, kit it out with a kickass hyperdrive for another half mil, if nothing else a few milk runs a day could keep your bank account healthy enough to pay the rebuy on your Cobra twenty times over. xP Then just alternate; fly around and blow stuff up much of the time, but do more profitable trading runs in between.
