Hmm. My question here is, why are you doing a dedicated surveying run? My assumption has always been that it'd be a late-early-game-to-midgame thing (which generally gets paired with other activity) and that when you colonize, it loses importance and you'd only do it when there's a good opportunity, i.e. you're already there for another reason.
It seems like as a means of making credits, there are things you can do more quickly that are also more fun, no? And you could combine it with other things, which seems like it'd be more effective. I'm not sure I've got a handle on why you'd specialize into "doing a survey run" if it's not fun, since it doesn't seem like it'd be that profitable, either. Feels like I'm missing something here.
I typically do survey runs because I want to map the sector. Gotta know where everything is before I know where is a good place to set up colonies. Technically with the way colonies are now you could just set up anywhere and it would work, but I think most people would prefer to optimize.
While I'm at it, the survey run doubles as probe/station etc duty. Running through every planet in every system in one corner of the map is pretty much the only way to be sure to find most of the good stuff. Again, you could set up perfectly fine without the nanoforges and syncrotrons, and get the blueprints from spamming raids, but all of that is sub-optimal.
There are plenty of features to direct you to those sorts of things piecemeal, but you end up going 100 times the distance back and forth visiting systems seemingly at random.
In order to eliminate long survey runs, you would need to make the following changes:
Individual planet surveys are always extremely expensive (supplies/machinery etc), so you cannot run more than one or two systems at most even with a full fleet of freighters
In return, individual planet surveys are usually extremely profitable, making surveying worthwhile, while still making it impossible to survey every planet at once.
All interesting things can be discovered without the need to meticulously check every system. Nothing is missed by flying over boring systems or not visiting remote corners
That last one can be helped by massively buffing the preliminary survey skill. Imagine you press the button in hyperspace, and you are immediately told the types and number of planets in every system in your current constellation, the types and numbers of domain probes, mining/research stations etc, even the number of fixed locations in each of those systems, and the location of all nearby warning beacons, maybe even the types but not quality of resources on each planet. Basically all the information you would need to know if a system was worth visiting for any conceivable reason. Note that this doesn't replace visiting the system if it's good, you still need to survey planets manually and you still wouldn't know where the domain probes etc are inside the system.
The current system where domain probes give you data on "interesting" planets is worthless. You don't know what other planets are in that system (a good colony requires multiple per system), and no matter how many probes you find you don't know if you've missed something, so you have to check all the unexplored systems regardless.
Additionally, replacing the supplies/machinery cost of surveying with some specific resource that's only used for surveying and maybe colonizing, therefor requiring you to plan specifically for how many planets you need to survey, rather than taking as many supplies as you can hold and going until they run out, would be a good idea.