Frustrated by the Engineering grind… (A Rant)

I’m specifically looking to engineer PAs rn. Boy have I had an immensely frustrating time and I haven’t even landed at ya Boi Bill Turner’s spot.

It’s annoying enough that one has to unlock an engineer from another engineer from getting a high enough “relationship” with them.

It’s annoying enough that many engineers are clear across the bubble from others.

It’s annoying enough that you then have to go on an extra mission to even start with them that even sometimes goes almost 1,000ly away to get said product.

It’s annoying enough that, in Bill’s case in particular, sometimes you need to get a minor faction to ally to get a system permit to even be able to access the system that they’re in.

It’s annoying enough that once you FINALLY unlock the engineer, you then have to grind and trade for materials to fully engineer something.

It’s annoying enough that once you have the materials, you still need to spend a good chunk of time pressing the same 2-3 buttons to then fully upgrade that part and that’s not to mention the fact that upgrading is a roll of the dice and it could take 2 tries or it could take 10.

It’s annoying enough that once you’ve upgraded your part, it’s then a whole other grind to add experimental effects and that you need to visit the engineer again to swap those effects

It’s annoying enough that you can’t just pull out an upgrade and move it to something else. If you sell that part or want different upgrade, you just lose that previous one forever which means you need to grind again.

This is then all completely necessary to have any chance in PvP and sometimes in PvE. At the very least to make more cr quicker.

Essentially, it’s absolutely demoralizing and daunting to think about and execute. Just to be able to do the thing that you might want to do, you embark on a 2 week side quest to get that done so you can then actually have the tools to do it.

It would be better if engineering was tweaked so it isn’t SO grind-y.

Hell, if they just made it so you can put experimentals on from anywhere just like you can bookmark a particular upgrade to use remotely, that would be better.

If they also made it more consistent and got rid of the randomness it would be better.

I’m not looking for huge changes here, it’s just absolutely asinine and seems like terrible game design to have it set up this way, especially since it’s pretty much mandatory even from a mid-experience player’s perspective.