You are correct. By the TNG era site-to-site transport had become reliable enough that it could be used as needed, but having a pad at one end or the other (or both) of a transport was still safer. It was also more energy-efficient, though that’s less of a concern.
Always a good idea to make things efficient, but “the transporters take too much power” is a sentence you will never hear on a galaxy class at least. Those monsters had insane power generation capability.
You are correct. By the TNG era site-to-site transport had become reliable enough that it could be used as needed, but having a pad at one end or the other (or both) of a transport was still safer. It was also more energy-efficient, though that’s less of a concern.
Always a good idea to make things efficient, but “the transporters take too much power” is a sentence you will never hear on a galaxy class at least. Those monsters had insane power generation capability.