One behaviour i fine myself adopting consistently is blowing up, I seem to do rather a lot of that.
Seriously though, when I was testing the hyperdrives oxp I needed to do some courier runs in an Adder and found then to be a lot of fun. Even in a cobra it frees up your cargo space for salvage, mining, or opportunistic tradng. It also leads you to systems that you might otherwise not visit where the default textures can dislay much greater variety than on a 'milk-run'.
Throw in a few oxps that introduce system specific elements (e.g. commies, dictatorships, con stores) and maybe one or two to keep it challenging (e.g. deep space pirates, hyperdrives) and perhaps the odd rarity (e.g. star jellies) then you have a nice dynamic between interaction and time limits.
Without sufficient time to dawdle, the game suggests that it has more variation than you have time to fully explore and also more than you are likely to see when exploiting the more profitable trade routes.
Another way is to take a ship with no hyperdrive, get yourself a wormhole scanner (or not) and see where the winds take you. Certainly helps to keep things interesting as you tend to be in a weaker ship and with less potential to make money. Contarct runs can be especially challenging

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