The stargates were no longer used because it was very slow traveling with them. Even the first ship with hyperdrive was faster. The devs have mentioned they want to introduce hypergates that would be better and essentially create a network, you need to build them on a blackhole. They will most likely be introduce in an expansion.

I was under the impression that ONCE a gate was in place, travel was instantaneous. It was the enormous time of placing them via sublight drives that was their biggest drawback.

Now that we have hyperdrives, this problem is gone, BUT, there was also the IMMENSE cost of building the gates. It seemed clear that this was a Multi-decade construction project, and it was also mentioned that their destruction could be quite dangerous to the system that held it (if that were to happen).

Given the dangers, cost, and time frame, it would simply not make sense to build them.

BUT, given the continuing advances of the GC universe, you could easily state that the technology can now be miniaturized and produced at reduced costs, making them viable once more.

I don't really think it should be dependent on blackholes, but hey, whatevs, I'll be super happy if they make a comeback! Especially if we can place neutral/indestructible ones on a map )

Here's one by Tetrasodium that sounds like what you're describing.

Except it's really not supported by the lore, as noted by some others in the thread; the start-of-game hyperdrives are at least twice as fast as travel by means of the backstory stargates was. ("A ship going through a stargate would still take months, even years, to go relatively short distances. With the new hyperdrive system, that time would be halved with improvements possible for even greater relative speeds." See the link posted by Rhonin the Wizard, and read the second paragraph of the last section.) I can't say I'd be averse to allowing the player to construct something akin to a high-speed rail network with fixed points at which you can get on or off of the network, but I've been more than a little leery of infinite movement systems since Civilization II (hello, railroads), especially when practically speaking it's (eventually) unconstrained infinite movement, and I rather like that larger maps take longer to traverse than smaller ones.