I like Atlas but there's too much dead time to go from one area to another

I feel like every node should have something on it.

I am enjoying the system and I don't mind that it's grindy, e.g. 300 breach splinters for a stone, but what I don't like is that I sometimes have to basically travel across 5-6 bare nodes to get to a decent area with towers to set up some more breach tablets. It feels like a grind on top of a grind.

I am not sure of the solution but I think it's something that should be looked at.

Breech splinters don't feel too bad, I've been pulling ~15 splinters a breech, so its roughly 20 breeches to get my second go at Xest, and it gets faster as I level up the encounters via the atlas tree (should be 40% faster this time with the chance of multiple hands).

Delirium, however... I might be doing something wrong, but I've only been getting 2-3 shards a mirror, which is way, way too low.

I'm not as far in progression but I wish that all nodes had at least a map boss.

The [early] mapping grind of finishing off the T1 to T16 map quests seem too grindy for me as I really want to use my high tier [juiced maps] on nodes with a map boss. Even blasting through "travel nodes" on the Atlas with low level junk maps takes too long :(

Unfortunately my build isn't particularly well suited for Breech or Delirium, is so-so at Ritual [need more Chaos res], and is slow but OK at Expedition so it feels like using good maps would be a waste as I really need the map-boss drop bonus (?) for waystone sustain.

My main issue with the endgame overmap so far would have to be having all these towers, and no tablets to put in them.

I keep picking a direction, working that way until I reach a tower, then obviously I don't want to do any other nodes in that area until i have a tablet in said tower, so I go a different direction.
Until I end up having reached a tower in every direction without having looted any tablets to put in them.