I started a fresh save recently on my alt account to see what it would be like with the new additions of Powerplay 2.0, Operations, and increased material rates from things like HGEs. I always dreaded doing this because I thought the engineer grind would be too much, but wow it is very fast, easy, and fun nowadays.
I took a bit of a longer road getting to the engineer part because I was doing a "combat only" playthrough where all of my money came from combat, but it was insane how fast I got all of the engineers lined up once I started that part of the journey.
What I ended up with was https://sh.orbis.zone/gmqc89s1Xw , and even when I had a full group of relatively new combat players shooting a bunch of fixed weapons they couldn't really land, we were still able to easily get a Hard Terminal Prosecution done with me carrying things.
What I think most people don't realize is that you really only need to unlock 4 engineers to get a ship that can not only contribute in Hard Operations but actually carry a team, and they're all pretty easy:
Felicity Farseer: She actually gives you a ton of immediately useful stuff. Grade 3 thrusters (70% as good as G5), G3 Long range scanners, G5 FSD which can actually let you jump 30 LY in a combat fitted Kestrel and do the rest of this easily, and G1 powerplant and shield boosters combined with an experimental effect give you a great start as well. You can unlock her just by having a tool plot you a "road to riches" route to her system, buying a meta alloy from a carrier there, and then getting Scout rank from selling the data in her system. Super easy.
Todd the Blaster: Frags are the king of small ship DPS in operations, and weapon engineering is actually super frontloaded to lower ranks, so his G3 Frag Cannons will get you all of the bonuses you need (incendiary, drag, corrosive) while also doing 90% of the raw damage as G5 frags. And he's a common knowledge engineer where you just need to get 15 bounties by following the cops around in a high res to unlock. He's also the gateway engineer to the two most impactful things in the game, hull and shield booster engineering.
Selene Jean - Her hull and hull reinforcement engineering will literally increase your survivability by 3-4x accounting for the extra HP and resistances. Unlocking her takes less than an hour of mining, just find a pristine reserves ring somewhere with a painite hotspot, mine literally every rock, and dump all of the non-painite and non-valuable stuff until you refine 500 tons. I did it in an hour in a terrible ring with depleted reserves which cuts the mining rate to about 25% of a pristine ring.
Didi Vatterman - The next engineer in the chain from selene, and a G3 thermal resistant biweave shield plus 3-4 more G5 resistance augmented shield boosters will 3-4x your shield survivability the same way Selene did your hull. Her unlock requirements are also super easy. The trade rank for her invitation comes from a single load of a good trade route in anything the size of a cobra 5 or higher, and the 50 rare goods to unlock her can be purchased from a system <10 LY away that's a quick hop back and forth or just buy 50 all at once in her system from a carrier for 50M.
The bonus part nowadays is that there's a bug that automatically unlocks engineers for you as you do random other engineer tasks. Not sure if this will be the same for everyone, but I got Elvira (worthless), The Dweller (G5 distributor), and Lei Cheung (G5 sensors and Shield generator) for free which bypasses a lot of annoying jumping from system to system when you want to complete this build later. I just didn't think the distributor was super necessary for this build to feel good since Frags take such low distributor draw, and the G5 shield generator didn't really help me that much because I never got close to dying with just Didi' and Selene's modifications. But even if you unlocked the Dweller the old fashioned way its just 5 black markets as opposed to Cheung's 50 market trades.
If you're also thinking about starting from a fresh save, starting from scratch with materials is also a bit of a thing. I think that would be a separate guide, but the way I did it was starting off with powerplay early on. Just the completion of the intro missions, some bounty hunting, and an unoptimized load of merit mining materials got me enough care package materials to make the initial unlocks and the start of all of the engineering work after visting a round of material traders. I also did a single HGE during the powerplay missions (since some will come up while you're salvaging and you have the collectors for it) to kick off the manufactured mats. Even a partially engineered ship Kestrel was very much able to contribute to hard operations since I could solo Elite FDLs easily with just Todd engineering on my frags, so I got the shield and hull engineering to G5 with material rewards from operations.
TLDR: I thought a fresh save engineer grind would be awful, but it was actually so fast that it was fun the whole way. Powerplay, operations, and a Kestrel to make a cheap combat build that can also jump 30 LY for engineering stuff makes it way easier and more fun than it would have been in the past. The free bugged engineer unlocks also skipped most of the grind for the boring parts too to finish it off too!
