first question:

why did you place 4 teleports around TMA, instead of placing one that allows you to telport into the four directions? with the current robot travel speed, the higway boost - its not much difference between running 1km or waiting 1min for the molecular instability to wear off. just that the travel part does not work with the lowest level pathfinding (no priority for highway)

I think it's more immersive this way. If you look at the north-east corner of the island, we could have left out that short highway strip and directly connect those teleports, but I feel like a short walk between different teleports adds to the "I'm going far away"-feeling, without being a nuisance. At least in my opinion it's better than waiting for a timer to expire.

second question:

whats that "status windows" button in the top left - such an relative unimportant button in a place where you had 5 years long the private storage button.

This is mentioned in the OP, this is now consistent with the menubuttons while on the terrain. But yes it might take some getting used to.

third question:

ambush mission npcs - will you make them despawn somehow faster? i have undocked from TMA and felt like i spawned into someone doing beacon farming, but no player seen anywhere. and they all have been loot-flagged for someone.

I'll need to check the despawn time for them, might be an hour now, which is indeed too long.

about the mission travel distances: you have placed lots of "random points", shown in that last screenshot you have posted. Am i wrong when i say that you could estimate the travel distances for each mission by calculating and storing the distances between those random points/mission terminals (wavefront algorithm) and the mission generator does a pathfinding algorithm along this ultra-simplified mesh with weighted (travel distances) connections to figure out the travel distance multiplier?

This is what we're doing. Though I don't understand why you want pathfinding for this, it's a simple chain. Or do you mean using the random points as "checkpoints"? Because that would be sort of exploitable, you would send out your robot far away with the autopilot, take a break, come back, send it back to complete the mission, and collect lots of walking rewards.