A better way...
Colonising the Inner Oort Cloud and building Gravity Focus telescopes to examine any star or exoplanet of interest in detail and without having to wait for star-probes to travel all that way kind of makes more sense to me. Once we know a system better then we can send automation to set up mass-beam projectors to deccelerate any expeditions we might want to send, or spy on the natives.
All our advances in invisibility and UAVs makes me wonder just how well probes can hide themselves. If they can even be seen at all.