Indeed it does ... if you know where to look (and understand what you're reading).
However, that rule is "inconvenient" for people who want "more money" to be available from ticket revenues ... so things like the per parsec rather than per jump interpretation keeps cropping up whenever someone designs a starship that is inherently non-viable economically on ticket revenues alone.
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Also for gamemasters who wanted a different style of milieu. Players can complain, but it's the gamemasters that decide the parameters of the setting. The thousand-credit rule didn't make sense on the surface, so a lot of folk tossed it out the window. Didn't cross over into GURPS, for example. I'm not sure about the other versions. You had to look beneath the surface, and even then not everyone liked what they saw. Some of the early adventures were pretty clear on the Imperium as a place governed by corruption and power. The Kinunir for example had that whole business about the imprisoned noble on the Gaesh. Not everyone liked that view of the Imperium. Heck, I was late in realizing it and I frankly don't like it but, when you think about it, there are a lot more adventure plot hooks in it than in the Imperium as a vanilla lawful good empire ruling benignly over an economy based on American principles of free enterprise.
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After all, if the rules (as written) don't work for you ... change the rules until they do.
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Well, yeah, that's what probably half the posts in the forums are about. That's how they finally ended up making a formal errata change to the High Guard crew casualty rule: people argued for change, made their own IMTU changes, until they finally agreed to errata the original rule. That's why GURPS is fundamentally different from CT: the way CT did it didn't work for the folk who created the GURPS version. It is a time-honored tradition resting in the simple fact that one can't control what people do in their own living room.
