First off, I love hacking in this game. It's fun, its clever, and it's great for getting a lot of bonus xp and credits.
But apart from the incentive of extra experience and money, there's a fuck ton of it, and the other gain is relatively minimal.
Here's what I think they should have done, make it networked...
Here's what I mean;
You are in Picus, there's 20 workstations of 50 to be hacked in the large room, they are connected in the hierarch;
Server > Router/Switch = Workstation
So the arrow (>) means that the possible secure connectivity is one way, and the equals (=) is that it is two ways, this gives multiple options;
Hack a workstation, to crack the workstation aim for the green objective node, this will open up the workstation for use
OR
Hack a workstation, to go from the workstation to the router/switch, aim for the Red security node, this will crack the workstation, and the begin ANOTHER minigame which starts a much larger network to crack the router, which is explained in the next bit.
OR
Find the router/switch (same as hacking through workstation), there is a cog near the security node (which is one way, so you can't get to the security node), which deploys a protocol or script, if you get to this cog, it will finish the minigame and unlock EVERY workstation the router/switch is connected to, scoring massive gains, but the problem will be the difficulty is getting to this special node.
OR
Find the server, you then have full access to deploy the protocol, but this will be like a level 5 security hack.
This would save a lot of time, be more fun, more realistic, albeit a bit more complicated. Hacking is essentially a side quest, except for a few sec 1 hacks, so really no issue here.