Is the Terracore in dead end?

Certainly, I am in one.

As I have mentioned in my last post, my Terracore goals had to be readjusted mainly to ever declining scrap price. It's hard to earn enough scrap to buy the required equipment for planet travels. In the current tempo I don't think I'll be able to keep up.
Since last week I upgraded my Engineering by 1 level and the time needed to mint a crate increased from 12 days to 19 days. At the beginning it used to be 3 days.
This means I'm falling behind. Even though I'm doing quite well. The game is being actively developed, I see and acknowledge that.

I'm behind my schedule, but I have upgraded my defence by 3 levels (instead of planned 2).

What should be my plans then? I don't really know. The intuition suggest that I should upgrade my Defence and Engineering in pursuit of a point in which the scrap price will stop falling down as fast and I'll be able to outpace the trend.

I'm not comfortable with investing more money into the game, so are other players I guess - the price wouldn't fall this much otherwise.
I think it is a major challenge for devs (plural yay! I want to stress out that I'm really happy with collaboration between gnome and asgarth.) decrease the tempo of scrap inflation.

A sinkhole maybe? A bot account that would upvote posts posted with terracore tag and buy scrap with liquid rewards and burn them. @deepresearch what do you think? Do you know how to automate up voting posts with specific tag? I don't see an option in hive.vote