I was under the impression that it took advantage of a rare alignment of planets to not only get a speed boost but also pass by all the planets to get photos of them.
In theory we could just do an arbitrary number of consecutive gravity assists between say earth and mars to get the speed to travel past a single planet to exmaine it and then travel on out of the solar system.
With the cost savings of the new Starship rocket, the increased scale of probes that it would enable, the increase in processing and sensing technology, and the lowered cost that would come from mass production of many probes we could probably end up with a more cost effective solution this way, even if we're sending more probes.
In theory we could just do an arbitrary number of consecutive gravity assists between say earth and mars to get the speed to travel past a single planet to exmaine it and then travel on out of the solar system.
With the cost savings of the new Starship rocket, the increased scale of probes that it would enable, the increase in processing and sensing technology, and the lowered cost that would come from mass production of many probes we could probably end up with a more cost effective solution this way, even if we're sending more probes.