I would like to get into a decent exploring ship and just head out into the wilderness, but sounds like it's still heavily biased towards Euro Truck Simulator in a type 9 still?
Best ship for exploration is the ASP Explorer, the hull costs 6M, once you fit it with the top rated FSD and D rated equipment, with no weapons it'll do about 37LY jumps, so it's perfect for exploration.
The problem with trading is that it makes about 20x more money than anything else, and if you want the bigger ships - you need
a lot of money - not only to buy the damn thing, but also to run it, (fuel, repairs, insurance etc)
To put it into perspective, I'm a pretty decent pilot imo - in conflict zones I can make about 150-200k per hour at a conflict zone, or about 600k-800k an hour at a good nav beacon, to put this into perspective - in a trade ship on a luxuries route, I can make about 18M per hour, or 10M per hour on a standard trade route, obviously combat is more fun - but if I'm doing that constantly in a big ship like a Python or an Anaconda, I'm not making any real profit, I'm roughly breaking even.
which means that if you're like me, and you've been playing since Alpha, you've already done a heck of a lot of stuff, and so big ships are the next thing - hence it turns into space-truckers 2015.