I've got a nice little selection of systems all within one jump of the system i call home...towards the edges of colonized space.
2 hi techs, 2 agricultures, and a half dozen refinery / extraction worlds, all with easy stations nice & close to the main stars. plenty of good little routes and enough going on to keep me happy (civil wars & economic booms, extraction sites in anarchy systems). I'm mainly doing missions now and am allied with most local factions - which helps with the big paycheck missions (sell us 5 palladium for 120k, ship 12 gold for us for 150k...)
mainly independents, one fed and one empire amongst them.
I crossed over coloized space to Pand (right on the opposite side) and did a little bit for the "Friends of Pand" group - they're trying to get expansion in a frontier system with about 8 terraforming candidates...but no-one seems to really be organising that effort much just now, so i went exploring for a bit but that whole area was fairly duff so headed back here.