It's exactly as you have stated, what a waste of time. How difficult is it to put the required npc's in their own instances? I feel it's just lazy programming & another unwanted time sink. I was looking forward to this event, but now I shall not bother, good job BioWare

I don't have the fastest machine available but, given these hard times, I have to make do, it does meet the minimum requirements and I have no other issues. Now before 1.2 I had very little issue while loading up the space combat mini game, but since the patch my loading times have practically doubled. This now means that once my ship has actually loaded I have missed, in some instances, critical mission targets i.e the bridge of a captital ship. I feel a simple solution would be for the player to press the space bar to actually start the mission, giving slower machines time to load. Other than this I have no issues with 1.2, keep up the great work!

I agree with the OP, maybe not get rid of it just turn the volume down some & make it less constant.