Thinking about it more, I think it’s maybe even bleaker. Forget the galaxy hopping for a moment. We have two modes of travel, portaling and faster than light warping. Lets say portaling is some sort of instant quantum entanglement something, but faster than light travel is going to have relativistic time dilation effects. Because we can still find the same people after a warp, everyone must be functionally immortal. Otherwise we’d have never see the same NPC twice, if we traveled by starship.

We’re for sure in a high economic disparity universe. Like we’re the 1% of the 1% living in a hopepunk wonderland and then the crews of our frigates are indentured servants living in the grimdarkest grimdark. I read all those expedition debriefs and, well, I’m glad I’m not crew. I don’t know if that qualifies as a head-cannon or if it’s just an observation. We and all the other NPC’s we encounter are for sure extremely high net worth individuals though.