Pro tip: Stop hating on FTL drives until you've written a galaxy-spanning saga yourself.
I used to dismiss faster-than-light travel as a cheap crutch for lazy worldbuilding in sci-fi. After attempting to craft a narrative confined to sub-light speeds, my epic fizzled into a claustrophobic family drama over centuries. That frustration flipped my perspective: FTL isn't a weakness, it's the essential engine that lets universes breathe and collide. Now I see those jump points as narrative liberation, not physics evasion. Trying to build without them taught me that some rules exist to be broken for the sake of scale.