It was for the index because anoms and signatures are not spawning reliably enough if you do not have upgrades. By the time some signatures or anoms have spawned or respawned, especially in a newly conquered region or constellation, the index will have degraded by a few percentage points. This problem was brought up in the feedback topic for the patch when CCP removed the empty asteroid belts and this is their solution: make everyone’s lives more annoying. I have had a few instances where targets got away because Blood Raider NPC neuted my tackle dry and I could not keep the warp disruptor running. Truly great experience.
The best “hope” now is that CCP will reintroduce all these removed belts after they so boastfully claimed that ore content in all asteroid belts would be doubled in the New Dawn quadrant, and that they remove these annoying extra mass spawns of NPCs on gates.
