Isabella has a speech about this! (She is so often asked why she's wasting her talents this way.)

"I enjoy the long stretches of solitude. I've seen some beautiful planets, some lovely stars, before anyone else got up close. And the surveys get used - Starfleet and independent shiplanes need to know what's where, which class M planets they can send escape pods to, where to find ore and where they can live off the land with compatible biology, where black holes are hiding. It's simple, but it's useful."