Where to go from here?

So by just about any measure, I'm still very new to the game. I've owned most of the small ships, built a maxed out Krait MK2 miner, used it to mine enough platinum for a maxed Diamondback Explorer and Vulture.

Now I'm sitting on 100 million credits but no idea what to do with them.

I guess I should work on engineers, but I don't want to just grind that single mindedly. I'm really enjoying blowing up large NPC ships with my nimble little Vulture, but the profits are tiny compared to mining, which puts me off investing in a bigger combat ship. I'd like to see Barnard's Loop eventually but I don't want to be stuck forever from "home" or get bored along the way and want to pew pew some pirates.

Is it feasible to build a real all purpose ship and just tool around the galaxy organically progressing and unlocking stuff? Like a Krait Phantom with some guns, refinery, SRV, 72t cargo, moderate jump range, balanced build? Or am I going to wish I had min/maxed for engineer unlocking, knowing there's like a 5000ly travel requirement in there?

Or should I just suck it up and grind the engineer unlocks?