That sounds like a recipe for some terrible monopolization by the first few civilizations that manage to achieve FTL:
Those who are the earliest to expand into the universe, would have access to the most resources, so they would be the only ones left who can afford to use FTL anymore, while younger civilizations may never have a chance to get out of their home stars.
Eons ago, the universe was room temperature. I've always wondered how an intelligent species adapted to that time would perceive our universe.
Yeah, that's where the "evil empire/East India Trading Company but in Spaaaaace" was going to come from. I wanted to use hyperspace/FTL as a vague metaphor for a scarce but crucial resource like fossil fuels (or whale oil, back in the day.)
I think it would be much more sinister.
The FTL controllers would be seen as gods by species who have yet to leave their homeworld. Every civilization within their sphere of influence would be either have to be their allies, thralls, unable to move around in the galaxy unless they get piggyback rides by the FTL barons, or engulfed and extinguished by them.
Imagine if we in the real world found out that there was no way to explore the universe we've been observing for centuries, unless we allied with some alien species that does not, can not, have our best interests on their minds.
Interstellar travel would require resources, and resources would require interstellar travel..
To go against the FTL species you would need to control at least as many planets as they do, and to control that many planets you would need FTL travel..
Sounds like a monumentally hopeless reality.
In terms of darkness and hopelessness, this is getting close to Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy.
A rot13 spoiler follows.
V xabj V fgvyy unir cnatf bs rkvfgragvny qernq nsgre gur frpbaq be guveq obbx vagebqhprq gur pbaprcg bs qvzrafvbany erqhpgvba jrncbaf. Onfvpnyyl, n fhcrejrncba gung fgnegf n furrg bs 2Q fcnpr rkcnaqvat ng yvtug fcrrq, juvpu erqhprf rirelguvat vg gbhpurf, vapyhqvat fcnpr vgfrys, gb 2Q. Vg'f bar bs znal JZQf ninvynoyr gb cbjreshy fcrpvrf. Abj gur qnex guvat vf, vg pna'g or fgbccrq. Bapr hayrnfurq, vg'yy xrrc rkcnaqvat ng yvtugfcrrq, qr-qvzrafvbavat fcnpr sberire. Ohg fcrrq bs yvtug vf fb fybj, gung lbh pna qebc vg ng lbhe rarzl'f ubzr flfgrz naq abg pner nobhg vg sbe zvyyravnf.
Nsgre gung, sbyybjf gur dhrfgvba. Unir lbh rire jbaqrerq jul jr yvir va 3Q fcnpr naq abg, fnl, 12Q? Gung'f jul.
I think I have kinda grown out of such existential dread, once I started having a sort of intuition that the Universe is too inconceivably large to be uniformly altered, let alone "damaged", by any single event or entity (which also makes me cringe at sci-fi which throws the word "universe" around so lightly.)
More importantly, I started thinking of the "backdrop" of Reality itself to not be Nothingness, but Everythingness.
That is, the blackness we see out there, must not be the default state. I imagine a flood of "white" behind the void, and the reality we perceive is just a heavily-filtered slice of it.
What led me to this way of looking at things was a comment on HN or Reddit, that talked about how, in certain axioms of mathematics, you can have a null/empty set but it's impossible to have a set which contains everything including itself. Whereas in another group of rules, it's impossible to have an empty set because everything else is arrived at by "subtracting" from the "infinite" set!
Maybe someone here knows better of what I'm referring to.
Wilbur and Orville Wright did precisely that for flight until the US govt dismissed the patents due to WWI. The patents, and their insane lawsuits, were poisoning the whole US on flight. Europe grew by leaps and bounds, and had all sorts of aircraft.
Well... actual reality doesn't even old much hope for FTL.
I believe one of the aborted ending ideas (and dangling plot-threads) for the Mass Effect series was something like this.
Like use of "Element Zero" (the exotic matter unobtanium that powers everything, including FTL travel) releases some kind of "dark energy" that is bad for vaguely defined reasons; one of which being that it destabilizes stellar fusion and makes stars go nova prematurely.
So the "Reapers," or big-bads of the series, were an ancient civilization that set up a recurrent process of culling nascent advanced civilizations to prevent them from growing and using such technology to problematic levels.
They ultimately scrapped it and went with an "AI and Man can't coexist" angle instead.
I once had, and never used, an idea that the consequence of using such technology was to accelerate dark energy, so that the more civilizations used FTL travel, the greater the energy requirements became. As if seafarers had to deal with the oceans expanding just a bit every time they were crossed.