Steve,
One option to diversity FTL movement a little is to base 'safe' FTL range on target star mass. This means that you can easily jump to more massive stars, which then by nature end up as 'nexus' points on the map, at the expense of being harder to grav survey which seems rather elegant in my opinion. There is no penalty for exceeding the max range, except for a chance for something to go very 'wrong'.
Things that could go wrong on a jump include emerging at another system along the same vector some time later, getting lost in hyperspace or falling out of hyperspace somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and maybe letting things from beyond into this side?
Drives could be specialised in two directions; commercial drives which have large drive flares, and possibly large early warnings (if you decide to go with that), but are very stable up to a certain range, but inaccurate unless the system is surveyed.
Alternatively, military drives, which reduce flare and warning signal, but are generally shorter range, and are more precise exit wise even in unmapped systems (though never as good as in a mapped system).
These would be on some kind of sliding scale.
Scout/survey designs could either mount the commerical drives and suffer the flare, but have longer ranges, or mount the military kind for increased stealth, but pay for it in safe survey range.
This means the commercial drive would also be more delta v efficient in the long run since you would not have to realign at systems along the jump path.
An extra idea is that of the hyperspace gates for linking surveyed systems (possibly requiring a 'second stage' survey?), at the risk of letting enemies through too.