FD seems to have 3 approaches to finding things.
1. RNG missions - doesn't really matter where you go - it'll spawn sooner rather than later - e.g. most find and return missions.
2. Specific placement - we've put something somewhere - someone will stumble on it eventually - e.g. the Titan Graphics card.
3. Follow the clues - we've put something somewhere, here are the clues - e.g. the Treasure Hunts.
The UA/Barnacle stuff seems to be a mystifying mix of all three except it's as hard to find the clues as the objects and we're never sure if the clues are real.
Add to that the rarity of each find and this becomes utterly reliant on community effort - people are doing their best to coordinate that but again this is an issue of game vs. meta-game.
Random hunts for random things are very unsatisfying - only the treasure hunts are breadcrumb led and they are seemingly reliant on vast out-of-game knowledge repositories to solve the clues - that's fine, maybe that rich guy is an ancient Earth mythology nut but I think FD can do better.
The forum is not the place to reliably share knowledge, every hint and clue needs to be in-game and every piece of real progress needs to be acknowledged in-game.
Throwing in red herrings and false leads is fine, so long as the real clues are there.
The tools are already there, Galnet is a bit of a mess but it is the game's news outlet. Invent some fringe conspiracy media that publish weird and wacky stuff, have Palin and rival investigators publish claims and counter-claims, have Universal Cartographics publish a periodic journal including 'unusual discoveries'.
Use server monitoring to figure out when Cmdrs do something significant to move these mysteries forward and maybe contact them for a news report, or just make one up.
Remember the Tier 2 NPCs idea - use the Contacts board to introduce these guys and provide new sources of information to commanders in good standing with them (reputation, rank, etc.)
It's great the way the community comes together to move these things forward but that does generate an awful lot of white noise.
We really need FD to act as a filter to propagate the right clues in the right way.
Then there are the tools that aren't there - searching a planet's surface needs more than eyeballs and memory. You need to know where you've been, and a way of marking what you've found.
Repeated themes but when the sand in the box is so shiny, it's frustrating to not have much in the way of sandcastles yet.
