EVE Online - MST not Traveling Salesman?

Whilst writing the introduction post, thinking about the various pieces I've worked on over the years, one problem came to mind. The problem feels initially like the traveling salesman problem and looks something like this:

I have a number of locations, each with goods at them. I want to find the best route to take to collection all my stuff.

Sound like traveling salesman right? Well, it did to me. As I thought about it tonight though, I wondered if there wasn't a better approach.

The way of traveling between systems in EVE is via Jump gates. This makes travel akin to traveling a directed graph. The second think I realized is that whilst there are cycles in the graph, the are secondary paths, and the majority of significant paths within a region are largely typified by a tree.

I'm thinking that it might be possible to approximate the problem from a gnarly traveling salesman situation into a minimum spanning tree problem with a few assumptions that are reasonable.

Of course at this point, my knowledge of minimum spanning tree is pretty limited, but I know enough to be dangerous! I've got a weighted graph and I'm not afraid to use it!!