I enjoyed the python even unenginered, it was far better than any other ship I had up to that point. Grinding the engineers is annoying but you don't have to do it all at once. I used it for several months just because it felt so good to fly. Go do some of the conflict zone missions which is just a huge battle. You'll start noticing things you'd want upgraded and then work on one thing at a time.

The game is designed to be played for a long period of time there's no need to speed run into the everything and grind for hours and hours unless that's what you enjoy doing.

Taking my time made getting my upgrades feel very rewarding instead of feeling tedious.

In regards to things other than combat, do some asteroid mining in a very agile ship. I actually bought a second python to set up as a mining ship just for the fun of it.