In terms of ultimately winning the game, it doesn’t matter.
You can win the game activating every single base, fielding a dozen teams and aircrafts and trying to protect every Haven, or you can do like I’m doing on this playthrough, which is “I will do the HDs that I can and go aggressively against Pandoran bases when I find them, but I will not attempt to maximize scan coverage (and thus defend every Haven/destroy every Pandoran structure)”.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with the fact that this is so - you can put a lot of effort into slowing down the Doomsday Clock, or focus more on beating it.
What I don’t like is that whatever approach you choose you can’t base your decisions on reasonable expectations, but rather need to have preacquired knowledge of how some rules that don’t make a lot of sense end up operating.
For example, if you want to protect as many Havens as possible you have to aggressively raid them to obtain the necessary resources. And if you pay attention to the diplo rating you can increase your rating with all the factions as you are raiding their Havens. Or alternatively, you can engage in some commodity arbitrage, which although could actually make some sense thematically in the PX universe (the factions can’t trade between them due to their animosity, so PX takes advantage of its neutrality) is just a very tedious exercise with no risk, no opportunity cost, no interesting decisions…
At the same time, to do what I’m doing, I need to prioritize diplo relations (because Haven reveal, resource rewards and research dump) and exploration, because once I know where the Havens are, most of the other POIs have resources, if not as scavenging missions than as text adventures.
It’s the worst for the new player, or the kind of players who don’t concern themselves with figuring out the arbitrary rules that govern the game (like the diplo rewards and penalties; e.g. that you want to steal the aircraft after you achieve a higher diplo status) and base their decision on what a reasonable person would expect will happen (i.e. attacking a Faction to steal their aircraft murdering a lot of their people in the process may result in war).