but I think you have the answer here. Perhaps the "low passage" model adopted from Tubb's Dumarest novels is more typical of the Imperial frontiers and hinterlands--where the Third Imperium setting began--

People on the frontier may be willing to take more risks to reach for a future. Or to escape the crushing urbanity, miserable poverty, and the utter police state that much of an Imperial Core could look like to the bottom 30%.

But I consider that the Dark Imperium setting.

Some of those folks will want to travel interstellar distances and so, in a market economy, others will seek to meet that demand as inexpensively as possible, mirroring the "Longshanks" ethos as they do so.

Yes, the body-bag merchies willing to run such passages strictly for the money would be pretty amoral or would perhaps think of the poverty stricken and desperate as beneath any form of human empathy and compassion (because that is the way the top and all the layers down in the government operate and thus so goes some parts of the business world which already starts out with a fair whack of amoral, psychopaths in management).

That still feels like Dark Imperium, even with a velvet glove on it.

It's mostly dark in the way that the leaders and governments and businesses think and what that says about the culture.

I can work on Traveller articles for Jeff without the bleak...