Engineering is the incentive to use the material pseudoeconomy, which fulfills Frontier's ideas of progression better than the credit pseudoeconomy, because the credit economy has been broken since mid-2015. I strongly suspect that they didn't want to overtly antagonize players by making their CMDR's credits worthless by raising prices and cutting rewards until things made some sort of sense, so they decided to make credits worthless by making key forms of progression simply use a different medium.
At this point, I'm mostly only limited in what I can Engineer by manufactured materials. I put many thousands of km on my SRV before Engineering even existed and have added many thousands more since, so raw materials are zero issue. I also come across so much basic scan data that even the higher grades are perpetually full, so I just trade for whatever data I'm missing.
HGEs for manufactured materials can be tedious at times, but I don't find it to be anywhere near as bad as some people make it out to be, and I usually find a fair number of HGEs just traveling from place to place. The rest of my manufactured materials I mostly acquire doing smuggling, massacre, or assassination missions that I'd probably be doing any way for BGS purposes.
I'm not sure if the current system is actually well paced, or if the pre-3.0 system (that had me dumping thousands of rolls into one module only to never use it because it was never as good as another module I already had, or was flatly noncompetitive regardless) was so back-breakingly absurd that almost anything less tedious would seem well paced in comparison.
Anyway, never liked Engineering, but I do see the need for some sort of scarcity somewhere, and I've mostly given up hope that credits will ever be overhauled.
