Really? It sure felt like a grind to me having to search through 10-20 USS hoping to get the right cargo, or the assassination target. Whenever you go into an USS there are 5 others close by, but when you come out of an empty one, or a wedding procession, or a guy trying to get you to deliver the cargo which you haven't found yet to somebody else, they have all magically disappeared and you need to look for the next USS for 2-3 minutes before rinsing and repeating.
Completing even the most basic of missions can take a few minutes or several hours without you doing anything different. And then there is no correlation between the time spent and the reward. You can chase after a high bounty and get destroyed by the guy and his armada, or you can try going for the scraps which could take hours for meagre reward. I guess what most people just end up doing is camping the nav beacons and trying to kill steal from the security forces or other NPCs battling it out. That was fun for a bit, but I got tired of it quickly.
It would also help a lot if the salvaged (wreck) cargo wasn't flagged as stolen. It shouldn't be illegal to be salvager IMO.
Then you have the other missions where they want you to deliver cargo x, so you fly to several stations that are suppose to be selling cargo x, but none of them have it, so you fly farther and farther out hoping to get it. Eventually you just give up, or you find it and return for a reward on which the prices have since updated and it's no longer profitable. That's if you can find one of these missions.
IMHO the biggest issue with the missions is that they are (and I can't believe I am going to say this) simply to random. If they give you a mission to go and get X, there should at least be enough X somewhere in the nearby vicinity. I've been made massive amounts of credits to kill a sitting duck in a low level ship, and I've been completely annihilated in seconds by a high levels ship with a measly bounty. Again lack of correlation between the challenge and the reward.