You can. By giving a lot of extra speed to hyperline early game and ability to build custom hyperlines later
Hyperlane were already way faster than other FTLs..
The main problem was the lack of liberty, which was clerly a huge handicap for your early game.
We can talk for hours about the fact that giving "a lot of extra speed" would have fix or not the issue.
In my opinion, this kind of solution is at best a pad on a broken leg. In the worst case scenario, it would have just been something completely OP at some point with the capacity of building your own hyperlines.
And it's even worst when you put the jump drive into the equation.
Putting bad on paper ultra focused ideas never works for balancing when you look at the biggest picture.
And, i don't want to be mean, but let's be serious for this one.
Sorry bro, but but when i see what happened to Stellaris the last 2 years, i can say it without any doubt: We dodged a bullet.
So, a very good FTL method had actual drawbacks...? Who could have guess. But for you it's just a pain.
A very good FTL used by almost no one because of that, AND the only FTL who costs resources, AND has an energy unkeep to maintain the stations which was terrible in end game.
SO PLEASE!
That's funny, because it's only good when we compare it to the hyperline drive.
Meanwhile, we have the warp drive. Almost as fast, 0 upkeep, with more freedom -> 0 drawbacks.
Everything looks more shiny compared to garbage, right?
Corvette spam was a thing back then because of 2 reasons, the global speed, allowing fast and unpredictable attacks because of the FTL.
And the general inefficacy of other ships, which was fixed after some patchs if i remember correctly.
So yes, it had to do with FTL.
And i still think that interests of majority should be before interests of obvious minority. Especially if, by your own worlds, the minority is just fine playing with mods. And, btw, you had option to enforce FTL type anyway. The only thing that was missing is an ability to turn off hump drives. I'm sure one checkbox was easier to implement than "rework".
That's ironic , as far as i see, the majority of the fanbase welcomed the FTL rework without issue after the traditional "time of adaptation", and the ones against it were just a noisy minority.
And I can prove it actually.
It's good you talked about the "fine playing with mods" thing at it will prove my point.
Then, ok you can just use mod bringing it back. They exist(ed).
But be ready, the reality will hurt you when you will notice the fact that what you are calling "majority" is actually the obvious minority, as none of the mods are more than a couple of hundred subs at best.
Meanwhile the "True Hyperdrive-only" i was using still has 1100 subs, while being deprecated for 3 years. Just to give some perspectives.
I don't know, call me naive but i am pretty sure such a feature, wanted soooo hard by the so said majority of the community would have been at least half as popular as a mod, now dead for 3 years.
But who knows?
It's an issue with "one fleet" reality of Stellaris which didn't go anywhere at all. You just have easier time catching fleets up.
As far as i can see, it just removed a toxic part from stellaris.
So i am fine with that.
Basically everything is easier and simpler for you with new FTL. Because you had hard time having things under control in multiplayer. A lot of very heavy Subjective opinions instead of facts.
Basically, everything is simpler for everyone with the new FTL. Everyone had hard time having things under control in multiplayer AND in solo. Even in this topic, some are talking about the unpredictable AI.
Even back then, on a other forum I remember all the topics i saw and the time i spent to help new players handling this aspect of the game which was NEVER enjoyed by literally NO ONE.
And the shit got real when you were in end game, against federations and vassals, fitted with jump drives, attacking everywhere in your territory without any form of logic.
So, again, what you are saying is pretty ironic.
As far as i can tell, people may do loved the liberty of ONE of the old FTLs, but no one loved to play against.
And just to clarify. I was natural when all the drama around FTL happens. Firstly, by that time i knew already that complaining is pointless, with facts or not, since the very first day i was against the Sectors as they were presented because giving away such level of control over players property is a bad things with usual PDX AI (and i was right 146%), and secondly i though that maybe the recourses that goes into fixing FTL maybe used for something i care more about, or single FTL type allow more depths in some areas. I was wrong. Single FTL type potential was completely wasted the same way as new POP system.
I agree that the FTL rework is still far from perfect and PDX made a lot of bad calls, maybe because of that.
But as far as i can tell, the current FTL system is fine and definitely not a mistake.
While the old was messy, and far from being anything else than a broken system giving real hard time to balance.
But if you want, we can both admit we are fighting over a pill of garbage anyway.
Because yeah, the sectors are trashes, and yeah, PDX didn't even bother to implement important stuffs with the new FTL rework.
I 100% agree to the fact that giving the possibility for the player to create new hyperlines nodes, or even just temporarily wormholes (who knows) for surprises attacks would have been a great addition to the current system for example,
And a mod currently alloys to do it.
But even with this mod, it changes nothing. The game is broken anyway.