I still feel like the "stare at dscan for 45 minutes" meta game doesn't respect my time

Ultimately, that’s the nature of open world mmos. Which is something I mentioned in an earlier post:

I did have a concept for some sort of battle arena (specifially the WARZONE section of the post) modeled after Infinity Battlescape set in the frontline systems (though the proposal was made before uprising was launched,) that I posted about in the past. The driving force behind that was to get people into the action faster.

Ultimately though, as I said, EVE is an open world mmo, and there’s only so much you can do in that environment. The vary nature of it involves a bit of time wasting.