Welp, I was gonna comment this just about word for word but ya beat me to it. I did find a few instances where trading was actually useful and I suspect it’s even more useful at the harder difficulties. For the scanning of planets for an away mission…I don’t remember it being for an away mission but I do remember needing to scan planets and like…OP must be blind or something because the planets that needed to be scanned weren’t scannable before as part of finding resources.