I'm not sure I understand what all this fuss is regarding an autopilot. As far as I can tell there's not much in terms of navigating that you can really do. Just get 3k from any large object, pick a destination from the nav map and hit the enter key.

Am I wrong in that assumption? Can I really navigate from one station to another without using hyperdrive? It doesn't seem possible as there are no navigational references and no real compass or coordinate system beyond the map grid.

So, that being the case it doesn't make any sense to me that an autopilot is needed.

You're not wrong. While I have no problem with the autopilot idea by itself, I can think of all sorts of problems that would come with it.

I guess the way I look at these things is more on a triage sort of basis.

To me it seems like there are thousands of much much cooler things the devs could be doing rather than spending time making what is already very easy navigation, even easier.

Personally... I would like the navigation to be made harder. I would like there to be ways to move between sectors without using hyperspace. This would be really awesome for sneaking around pk'ers and various other types of pirates. Not to mention you could hide all kinds of cool stuff out in the boonies.

I can understand the need for worm holes to traverse thousands of lightyears or whatever, but in system hyperspace seems like... Well like it could offer more.