Used to be, you had to edit the galaxy seed codes manually in savegames to go to alternate universes...but now even that doesn't work.
I used to do it to test my ability to cross random voids between systems using misjump tricks.
That's now the second critique you have posted about the changes to Oolite since v.1.77. Are there any others? The only negative comments I have really noticed have been about pirates being tougher (I'm ignoring the ones about the generic hassle of updating oxp's to oxz's).
And is there anything which you see as an improvement?
My extreme misjump OXPs are far less likely to crash now, due to fixes in the core of Oolite.
I've found a few bugs that were fixed (typically by Cim) after v1.77 -- these often weren't game-crashes, but could be cosmetic or game balance related.