I had 4k omicron in xanion, also you have to look at the damage and rate of fire vs. tech level. It's kind of random on drops.
As for long hyper jump times what I usually do is alternate between a warp gate and self hyper jump so i can always keep moving and exploring without a lot of downtime. I have a very large ship now with 7 system slots, so it does slow down a bit, but i'm still enjoying the bigger space battles (playing on hard mode).