Right now the portal fuel is not efficiently set up, by which I mean efficient for our servers and costs. Right now in the game, it is more expensive to have 1 portal that makes 5 jumps, than it is to have 5 portals each making 1 jump, encouraging chains of portals.
But for “us” it is the opposite and it is much better for our servers if there is a single portal making a big jump than lots of smaller ones (And it is also better for clients in terms of cache and network usage).
So I would be not be surprised if the fuel curve is tweaked to encourage more larger portals and fewer small ones.