Speak for yourself. I use slipstreams fairly frequently. As I said above, I generally plan my expeditions outside the Core around the stream cycle specifically to take advantage of them;
This might be a vanilla vs Nexerelin thing. I cannot imagine "scheduling" which side or direction of the sector I'm going to, on a timescale of months. I simply don't have that kind of margin, most of the time, and if I'm going out of the core, it is to go to a specific place that I need to go to RIGHT NOW and I can't afford to put it off by a month or two.
And if I DO have the time margin to play with, it's because I've opened the gates and can ignore streams entirely.
In vanilla, however, I can imagine it, because it doesn't matter how long anything takes; nothing meaningful will change. But the last time I tried playing vanilla - just to remind myself how it works - I got two game-years in, was extremely bored, and clicked "enable all" next time the game launcher came up.
Of course Alex is designing around the vanilla experience. But if the dynamic you describe is part of the intended goal, there should be purposeful ways to capitalize on it - not just "I'll wait a season". That's planetside farmer attitude, not spaceship captain attitude.
IME deep hyperspace storms are way more irritating and disruptive than slipstreams,
Other way around. Storms mean I can go fast in exactly the direction I want to go, right f'ing now, for a price.