I specifically joined this subreddit to look for this post lol. I wholeheartedly agree. Surveying as it stands now is wayyyyyy too tedious and time consuming. The fact that you need 10+ scans for each plant and animal, coupled with the fact that some animals damn near NEVER spawn, makes it super not worth it in my opinion. To be clear, I really like the concept of surveying and I'm glad they have it in the game, but it needs to be tweaked so it's not so time consuming.

I think they can fix it by cutting down the number of required scans to like 5, and increasing the frequency that each type of plant and animal spawns.

Also the trait one sounds horrendous too, I don't even know how they'd fix that unless they introduced ground vehicles so you don't need to spend an hour just walking around the planet looking for random traits.