ultimately i think it should be a more realistic realization of real world workings ( thats a lot of real) and i would say a lot of people dont like moving like a snail everywhere they go.. look at a lot of games if it has a "run" command it gets used A LOT. or if for instance your RPG character moves faster if it rolls everywhere.. people do that even though its silly looking.. essentially i think people dont want to waste a lot of time getting from point A to point B and if they feel that the game is making them be slow (for pretty much any reason) it frustrates them. i know im subject to the.. "why am i going to walk across this NPC zone when i can run get there faster and do what i really want" syndrome
I'm with you there. Unless you have fantastic scenery, 9/10 times the player is going to want to get somewhere fast. It's agonizingly slow trying to get past planets at ~50 speed.
I think its partly also to keep the player from being run down by huge fleets that will destroy him too.
If people don't want to get their butt kicked, they can easily get Augmented engines, or just stay away from those fleets which should be
easy to spot not only in the tab map (large triangles are large), but also in the normal map (massive amounts of ships and massive circle are pretty easy to spot). In addition, huge fleets usually contain large ships. Large ships are often very slow.