iteration2

You can undertake an entire interplanetary mission in 10 minutes? I'd spend longer than that just designing the ship. My last mission to Eve (using nuclear engines) took almost 10 minutes just for the Kerbin -> Eve transfer burn (albeit, with a larger ship than was necessary). Sure, I got over 1000 science, but compared to the 200 I can get by launching a ship about a kilometer into the ocean in a few minutes, the choice seems like a no-brainer.

I think the contract rewards scale up with the level of tech you're testing. Testing a low tier engine doesn't give much, and I haven't tried doing an entire game without a single launch. I also did a bunch of aerial tests and orbits, some of which were a bit difficult, to jumpstart my early science. But as I've progressed through the tree, I get contracts that are basically the exact same tasks, but with higher tier parts, and the rewards scale up to values that are still significant even for unlocking end-game tech. And since all of these tests are easy to do with full ship recovery (if a splashdown isn't required, I usually just send the rocket straight up, and it ends up landing right next to the launchpad) there's no reason not to use the largest, most overpowered engines with an excess of fuel, which makes all the aerial tests extremely easy.

My point is that you don't need to wring ANY science out of biomes anymore. You can progress through the tech tree without ever directing any rockets anywhere but straight up, use no science equipment (or even crew), and in many cases you don't even need to launch. I've gotten lots of contracts that give around 100 science for testing stuff (especially late-game engines) on the launchpad, kerbin atmosphere, and splashed down. I built a ship that just has a mainsail for lifting, a large fuel tank, a probe core, and some parachutes. The mainsail is powerful enough to get pretty much any payload to the appropriate height/speed for testing, and you get so many contracts that it's easy to find one at launch, one in atmosphere, and one after splashdown. A trivial mission that takes about 3 minutes can fulfill all of those contracts and reward a couple hundred science and over a hundred thousand funds. My scientific and funding endeavors took a serious efficiency hit when I put off lobbing random spaceship parts into the ocean to undertake a successful mun landing (despite fulfilling the moon landing contract and rescuing a kerbalnaut from orbit on the way).

I think the contract system is a great framework for moving forward, but as it stands now, it's very broken. In particular, I've found that, if my goal is to make money and advance science, actually going into space, especially when that involves traveling to other planets/moons, is not only unnecessary, but much, much slower than simply doing landed, splashdown, and atmospheric tests on Kerbin. Last night I launched my first Mun mission since 0.24. One would think the goal of such a costly and time consuming endeavor would be the scientific or funding boost from such a historic step, but given the uneven rewards given by the procedural contract generator, I gained science much more quickly with the mission that followed the Mun landing: Lobbing an unmanned tank of fuel into the sea, then "testing" some decouplers, engines, and landing gear that I'd bolted haphazardly onto it. I love the idea of being paid to test various parts I might not otherwise be using, especially when the testing parameters are challenging to achieve, but currently the rewards are completely out of whack. Also, I think it's a bad idea to offer science as a reward for an endless parade of repeatable quests. Previously, increasing science required you to expand ever outward and explore new worlds. That seemed to perfectly exemplify the spirit of the game, and really should be an inviolate design goal. Currently, we've got a system that's akin to being able to efficiently reach a level cap in an MMO by killing the level 1 pigs in the starting area. If the contracts only rewarded currency, they would still have an important purpose in the game, and balancing contracts (for money) and exploration (for science), would be an important aspect of play. Instead of being an either/or proposition, contracts could give you the money you'd need to build ships capable of exploration, which would be necessary to gain science, which would unlock more contracts, and so on. All that being said, though, I think that overall, a lot of great work has gone into this game, and the contracts, while currently broken, offer a lot of promise.