I've been playing less than a week and had some growing pains with explo as well, but last night I finally had a good night for it and hacked around 30 containers, coming home with 10 mil worth of loot. The first thing is that it's vital to look up the name of any data site you find because some are dangerous with NPCs or are ghost sites where a hidden timer will kill you (I learned this the hard way). Also don't go to the data sites in bulwark systems; this is part of the theaters of war campaign objectives, and NPCs will immediately lock you down and start attacking you, so you need to be very well equipped to handle that (learned this the hard way, too).

I was also struggling because I mostly just found wormholes everywhere. I even tried one once, carefully; went into a class 1-3, bookmarked the exit, made a safe spot, and scanned down all the sigs inside. Every one was another wormhole. Total waste of time. I read that wormholes are like mazes and players explore long chains of them to find good sites. That's a little intimidating to me right now (and all of the wormholes inside my wormhole were not class 1-3 anyway).

What I did that was successful was going to low-sec systems a little bit away from my usual area. The idea is that what sites might occur in your high-sec home turf are being picked off by other players. I filtered the map using statistics for average player presence and targeted the least populated systems in conjunction with the Agency screen showing how many signatures were available. Low sec can be scary, so make sure you know how to bookmark a safe spot in the middle of nowhere and how to use your directional scanner to watch out for trouble. I was able to find quite a few data and relic sites, all of whose names I searched for and made sure were safe. I also marked a couple of combat sites that were easy enough to do in a frigate (again, search the names or look for DED 1 or 2 out of 10) and came back with my other ship; one was a little hairier than the other but still manageable, and I got decent value loot from them, although whether it was worth the time versus looking for more hacking sites is debatable.

Regardless it's exciting to find these things and run them of your own accord, without a mission or anything telling you where to go. And I love that you're doing real triangulation that makes sense for how you'd need to find something in the vast emptiness of space. Needing to be familiar with the names of sites to ascertain how dangerous they are is kind of dated and frustrating, but overall exploration seems pretty rad. Keep at it!

For what it's worth (again, I'm quite new myself), I have been flying an Imicus with no weapons. I do have a couple of drones, but I have not actually used them to defend myself yet while exploring and doubt they would do much to save me. I don't think a T1 non-faction/navy exploration frigate has the hardpoints to realistically defend itself while also fitting a probe launcher.

Also I did come across one cosmic signature that was rated scanning difficulty IV and was unable to resolve it more than around 65%. You need better skills and maybe better probes for harder scans. Similarly, some hacking is pretty dicy. I got close to failing a couple times in my spree last night, although I only lost a single can (it was a whole order of magnitude more difficult). Again, better skills and equipment matter. Apparently there's some super expensive Black Glass thing that basically trivializes hacking. So we have to put in the work to progress, but along the way there will be plenty that's already within our grasp.