The cope for awhile was that it was 1.5x lightspeed while in hyperspace, which also distorted distances, so you got much, much faster travel speeds without messing with relativity.
Then they decided it was a multiplier applied to how long it took to travel a certain route, so lower was better.
Which isn’t a practical speed for interstellar travel. It’s literally just over warp 1.
More practical would be to assume that there’s a k missing 1.5k (thousand) light speed is warp 9.975.
The cope for awhile was that it was 1.5x lightspeed while in hyperspace, which also distorted distances, so you got much, much faster travel speeds without messing with relativity.
Then they decided it was a multiplier applied to how long it took to travel a certain route, so lower was better.