Au contraire, mon ami, missions are challenging, profitable and fun. Missions in EVE are well designed, as well. The standings loss is microscopic, but accrues over time. It’s easy (I hope someone else has mentioned) to repair your standings with the major factions. There’s no reason to fear standings losses in the amounts found in missioning.
As some of the respondents here are PVP-addicts, you might take a few (a bushel) with a grain (a dump truck load) of salt. Just Google “EVE Standings Repair” if you think you’re getting in trouble. You can see the effects of your standings with corps on your character panel.
There is a tiny icon next to the opponent on each mission. Once you learn to recognize the symbols for Caldari, Minmatar, Amarr, Gallente, and perhaps Ammatar and Thukker, you can just glace at it.
In addition to the above, blowing up buildings (especially sentry/missile/stasis towers) virtually guarantees standing hits, and utterly crap loot - so unless the mission explicitly requires destroying a building (towers don’t count toward ‘kill all enemy’ mission criteria), you are better off ignoring them whenever possible. If you have to kill them because you are insufficiently tanked to survive their damage, kill as few as possible to tip your tank back into the green.
While obviously faction ship kills and missions tank your standing, there is an underlying problem in some regular and storyline missions that CCP needs to address. One is where you are tasked with either bringing critical supplies or people to or from an opposing factions station therefore saving lives from that opposing faction and, yet, you still get dinged in standing with that opposing faction for helping them. Another case is where you are tasked with destroying pirate factions that ALL factions hate (rogue drones, blood raiders, Sansha nation) in an opposing faction controlled system and instead of rewarding you for removing a threat, they lower their standing with you.
I sent in a ticket years ago wondering why these illogical results were in the game and recieved a reply from a GM in the form of a shrug and "we want to make it “very tough to have high standings with multiple opposing factions”. When I pointed out how stupid the mission standing change was because of the mission premiss they claimed they were too busy to fix it.
Now with Trigs flipping systems in Epic Arcs paths, CCP is making it tougher for players to regulate their standings such that they can remain friendly with all major factions. It is doable, but for me running any storyline for any faction mission is out because I want to keep my +5.0 standings with all of them.
Yeah, I think they missed the boat with the humanitarian missions. It should be limited to firing on the faction’s assets, or ships. Possibly blitzing those where you can free the odd prisoner…but not so much as if you kill one of their pilots.