Didley Brohan is making a completely rational argument (for once).
Everything comes down to the fact that EVE’s gameplay mechanics are overly simplified and archaic. Having the game’s sole intelligence tool be a chat window would be acceptable in a game 20 years ago, and that’s exactly what EVE is: a 20-year-old game.
We could definitely get rid of local as an intelligence tool, but it would need to be accompanied by significant additions to the game in the form of various sensor suites that provide various levels of intelligence (with various benefits and drawbacks), instead of relying on the standby measure of mashing a “scanner” button every 5 seconds like a maniac (the book-dropping example is very apt), which quite frankly is absolute ■■■■ gameplay.
I’d like to see active and passive scanning arrays in the game. Or maybe being able to measure “ion trails” or something that would even act as an intelligence tool to know not just whether or not there are other capsuleer ships in the system, but also how many (i.e. the stronger the scent, the bigger the enemy gang floating around somewhere). I’d like to have observation drones and proximity alert mines. And I’d like to have various countermeasures making it possible to defeat all of these intelligence-gathering tools (but not all at the same time, and once again with various drawbacks). Each ship should have a sensor suite onboard into which you can plug various scripts and modules.
All of this should’ve been added to the game 15 years ago. Instead we have a chat window with a number on it, “perfect safety” cloaking devices, and a scanner window that gives you perfect intelligence on any entity that falls within its radius. It’s lazy-ass game design that hasn’t been worked on because the developers are too busy adding instanced farming content and event skins to their game.