Still why stealing it when you can get junk jet after a first native raid?
Because acquiring a jet before starting the expedition lets you access waterways quests and locations (e.g. Drag N Drop) without committing to finishing the expedition, which is a race against time when youre siding with Aegis. Having free reign of the shop pre-expedition also potentially lets you hijack every one of the best jets without having to aggro/kill Ray. As it stands, with the only way to succeed in that is destroying the cameras and thereby aggroing the police at the dock (and the rest of Core City subsequently), a vast majority of characters arent going to do it, as intended.
Personally (and this is getting into suggestion territory) I wish that sequence breaking your way into grand theft jetski were possible w/o becoming Public Enemy No.1 as a way to reward specialized stat investment as well as a way to mix up your playthrough instead of starting the expedition every time and then branching from there. The trouble with this is that it would necessitate a
LOT of added conditional script for something that most players will possibly never see: potentially, one could clear out every Lemurian facility and native camp before meeting with the expedition, and the dialogue would need to reflect every degree to which you alter the Black Sea before encountering the expedition for the first time. However, this would open up a lot of great new ways to approach the Black Sea content: taking out native leaders as a qualification for joining Aegis, joining the pirates before Briggs returns and coordinating a strike on the camp while theyre vulnerable before laying an ambush for the returning sec-troopers, (spoiler)
handing Oldfield the Acorn the first time you meet him, and so on. Again, these scenarios would require a LOT of additional writing to support them, but if there was some design encouragement backing up getting a jet outside of the expedition, this could become a really fun new way to experience the game.
