Thanks! Getting started seems to be a sticking point for people. I thought that might be a problem, so that's why I didn't add timers to individual requests, since it wouldn't feel good if people were failing the first few requests while they were still figuring things out.
I thought that would be good enough, but in hindsight I'm thinking the underlying issue might be inventory management. I'm realizing now that a new player would probably pick up a bunch of items at the beginning to learn where to get things and end up with a lot of stuff they don't need immediately, requiring them to trash or drop them. I could see that being tedious, is that what happened to you? After the voting period, I think I'll solve that by adding an item preview that appears when you're near a station, so you can see the item before you commit to picking it up.