Subluminal warp drive has a name in sci-fi - it's impulse drive.
In the fiction, impulse drive - sometimes called inertia-less drive - gets you up to speed without any apparent acceleration in the travellers reference.
That's mighty useful. Mighty useful, indeed!
If impulse drive is possible, we may one day flit between locations in our solar system at high speed, using much less energy and avoiding G-forces. Seems like a nice thing!
Nobody realistically expects FTL. Warp drive still has hope for reactionless or even just lower fuel needs that would be amazing. The other big thing would be reducing the impact velocity of the assorted random atoms in the way as you go fast.
I don’t know about others, but personally I would love to travel quickly through space without a dust mote piercing the aft of my craft and subsequently my skull, thereby obliterating my brain.
