The problem I have with ED isnt the travel time, more the amount of effort some trivial things take. Take for example RNGineering, IRL I have my work backed up on a pen drive and in the cloud. With RNGineers, if I want to upgrade my FSD I need to get some scans of anomalous FSD wakes. That takes time hanging out side a station targetting and scanning wakes as players / NPC's jump away. Yet if I want to apply the same upgrade to the jump drive of one of my other ships, I need to repeat the process of getting the wakes scanned as the data I obtained has been consumed by the process of crafting the first upgrade. Surely to [deity] there has to be file copying built into our 34th century operating systems? So Sticking with RNGineers for minute, I needed polonium in the early days of 2.1 - I'm sure y'all remember how hard it was to find? And that was meant to be in the 34th century where we mine asteroids and planets on a regular basis. Yet in the 21st century $275/kg available online. In game players would have been willing to pay millions for a couple of grammes of polonium.
Naval rank is another one, getting rank is an unnecessarily painful ache. Because there is no episodic content within the game, you have to haul this / fetch that as a way of building up reputation, then you get a naval ascension mission and get promoted. Many players who want the rank locked ships then end up feeling like they have to grind the ranks by spamming missions. Pre 2.1 donation missions were the most effective way of ranking up. Many many many corvette owners got their rear admiral ranks by means of donating credits to 17 Draconis. Splashing your cash around charities doesnt make you worthy of being a high ranking officer, it makes you a philanthropist. but you cannot just donate 10M credits to end the suffering in [begging system name] you have to do it a few thousand at a time many thousands of times over. That is another pure time sink.
We could just as easily make it an option to buy "engineering grade" minerals and chemicals from mining / refinery economiesm but only when you were friendly or allied to the controlling faction. Other materials could be available from suitable economies who you are friendly with. So players would have to work at getting allied with the faction that controls the refinery to get their polonium, then go to another system and get allied with a faction controlling a particular station there to get access to buy articulation motors.
Dont get me wrong, I dont want an I Win button, I want the game to be a challenge but surely a much better way of making players work for rank would have been to give them the option of enlisting with a superpowers navy, then getting missions dumped in their transaction tab? Those missions would be anounced by a comms message telling them they have been assigned a new mission and a summary there of? "Federal_Navy: CMDR, we urgently need you to go to [system 2 jumps away] and retrieve [cargo/data] from [star port] and deliver it to [NPC_name] who is patrolling the [Destination] system."
or "Federal_Navy: Commander, you are hereby ordered to go to the [sytem at war] and join the conflict zones and kill at least four hostile ships to provide reinforcement our weaponized espansion into that system by backing [BGS_faction] - Expedite and good hunting!"
I'm sure I don't need to comment on the pointless time sink that is powerplay.
Those are the sort of things most of us would like to see rather than repetious menial tasks or aimless roaming planets surfaces waiting on meteorites to spawn.
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