Surely not that cruise speed is therefore 1/3 of a speed greater than light. I don't care what you say, a trade lane doesn't take you past the speed of light, and thus the vocabulary used in Freelancer is unreliable.
It's entirely probable that the developers didn't want to beat the dead horse that is "Extra-net", so they picked Neural.
P.S. Everything is out of proportion! Don't give me that nonsense about, "Well, you -do- travel a month long journey rather quickly across systems...". You also use a liquid fuel source to get across it in five minutes.