Exploration missions:
- are not especially challenging.
- do not really have any continuous plot (afaik).
- do not change anything about the universe.

So, could you make a better mission?

Realistically, you'd have:
- 5-15 minutes of player time (I assume the borg/fed engineering officers and their 5-hour battles are an anomaly).
- 0-8 groups of enemies.
- no guarantee that the player has run quest X beforehand.

And, if so, do you think we could convince cryptic enough to replace some of the current missions?