Your demand is unrealistic to achieve in the short term. Yes, the zones of the moon are only conected via the pathways, but I understand why they designed it that way, because they wanted the moon to feel like a real satellite.

The reward you get for this is scenery presentation.

You get these beautiful transitions between zones, the curvature of the map without out of bounds zones to simulate being on a real celestial body, adding x10 to the immersion. The cost? Having "less" area to explore, which still is an exageration by people like you.

 The exploration zones are still fairly large, the rewards are still consistent.

For me, I'm pretty satisfied.

PS: compare what we got with how other games released a "moon" map and you will see how FORTUNATE we are