A few points of history [EDIT - which morphed into a more detailed version of Seolferwolf's suggestion for getting rid of jump gates completely AND a suggestion for solving the superluminal communication between systems technobabble problem]:
1) Jump gates went through a LOT of gyrations in mechanics over the years. I don't remember the details, but I think a major early phase involved manufacturing (5 mines of cargo space's worth IIRC of) "Jump Gate Components" (i.e. prefab) and hauling them out to a jump point on freighters where the construction module would put them together. There was a general consensus that this was too much micromanagement
2) There was lots of back and forth on whether or not they should be destroyable.
3) IIRC, the original vision was that they were like the Babylon 5 jump gates, i.e. both the mechanic of having jump engines on big ships to create a temporary wormhole AND the mechanic of having a permanent structure to create the wormhole (for small ships) worked in Aurora physics. This migrated into the (what I think is current canon) "open a permanent stable wormhole" idea when (IIRC) people started to argue that anything physical should be destroyable.
4) Jump gates were introduced before the current non-assault "jump bridge" (I forget the real name) mode of jump ships, where the player doesn't have to worry about micromanaging the ferrying back and forth in a non-combat situation. This mode was originally suggested as a level-of-detail abstraction (similar to e.g. not tracking the shuttle trips used to resupply a ship), but IIRC this offended Steve's sense of consistency
and so he changed canon to the "temporarily stabilized wormhole" idea.
5) For a long time (I'm not sure if it's still true), Steve needed jump gates for civilian trade route planning. He was worried that a civvie would load cargo at system A to go to system B, only to have a jump gate between the systems vanish. The discussion/model at the time was very much that jump gates were permanent infrastructure that an empire would construct to facilitate communication between the core systems, analogous to bridge building in land empires.
So I see the following ways to go:
A) Steve figures out how to manage civvie path planning, so jump gates can be eliminated altogether in favor of jump ships in "bridge" mode. This would be a full 360 back to wormholes requiring physical equipment to keep them open, except that physical equipment would just be the jump engines. Players would probably end up making "jump bridge" ships (similar to fuel processors) with small or no "commercial" engines that would be towed to a jump gate, i.e. the original idea would have been implemented in the smaller set of ship mechanics rules. I can see Steve liking this idea a lot
both from coding and technobabble minimization points of view - it's basically the same pattern we just went through where PDFs got folded into ground unit mechanics (except probably a LOT less coding & detailed nuance).
IDEA FOR SOLVING THE CIVVIE PROBLEM - [EDIT post-posting - This is essentially Seolferwolf's suggestion upthread] just add a "permanent jump bridge" checkbox to the ship's (not class's) or TG's info (same coding pattern as active sensors on/off). If the player checks the box, that signals intent to the civvies that he won't move the bridge and that the civvies can rely on it. [EDIT - should be a 3 state selector: "off", "temporary bridge", "permanent bridge" - see inner/outer empire discussion below] If a civvie gets to a system where the bridge is gone (either destroyed or moved), then the civvie tries to path plan to the destination using a detour route. If the destination is unreachable, it goes back to the original system or the nearest reachable system. If there's no route, then it gives up. [EDIT - thinking about "how does the ship know if the new destination is currently reachable given comm lag" led me to the following]
EVEN BIGGER IDEA FOR SOLVING THE SUPERLUMINAL COMMUNICATION PROBLEM - I would code all this up using instantaneous knowledge of the jump bridge network by technobabbling that jump ships in bridge mode can get signals from both sides of the wormhole and act as a rely - that means (if you assume super luminal communication within a system) that the "inner empire" becomes a very strong concept - it's all the systems connected by permanent jump bridges; these are the systems civvies will take contracts to. There's also an "outer empire" which includes ships providing temporary jump bridges. The two things the outer empire contributes to the game are that gives a mechanism for instantaneous communications everywhere in the outer empire and it can be used by the orders screen code to warn TGs without jump engines that they won't be able to make a transit they're putting in. Finally, there's the "fringe"/"rim" systems for which one has a jump that either doesn't have a jump ship or the jump ship is in "off" mode. And yes, I realize this is just putting the ICN from StarFire back in, except it uses the fact that superluminal sensing is possible within a system to technobabble away the need to track/lay individual repeater buoys.
The reason I made the edit above to generalize the temporary vs. permanent checkbox into a 3-state off/temp/perm selector has to do with enemy action. If you have an enemy sitting on the far side of a JP (where you have a jump ship) you don't want to leave it open (or the enemy will use it). So your ship would shut the wormhole to keep the enemy from using it, BUT that also knocks out communication through the wormhole. So adding the communication technobabble added this complexity. One way to get around it would be to introduce the idea of a "periscope" mode (like was introduced in the later Kris Longknife books IIRC) that lets a jump ship peek through a wormhole to see if there's anyone nasty on the other side. Then the enemy would have to park a ship on the wormhole in order to break it and the user wouldn't have to worry about micromanaging off vs. on based on enemy presence. I think it's a lot simpler and more interesting game play to be "blind" to what's going on on the other side of a JP unless you open a gate that the enemy can use. BTW, this probably means there should be a minimum time (e.g. 10 minutes) between opening and closing a bridge wormhole to give the enemy an opportunity to use it to pour through going the other direction.
B) I was going to list things like making jump gates two-way, keeping them as-is, etc., but I like what I came up with during the discussion above so I think that's the way to go (and suspect Steve will too).
NOTE - As you can probably tell, this post was stream-of-consciousness. I've marked changes upstream that occurred while thinking it through with "EDIT".
OBSERVATION - I think this is another example of parallel evolution of fictional universes (referring to the fighter/LAC thread a week or two ago) - I was simply trying to recapitulate the history of the jump gate discussion in the context of a re-think/removal being reasonable, and ended up with the ICN (with zero time lag).
John