Any help on this quest is appreciated, feel free to give spoilers if necessary I really don't give a bleep at this point. I'm trying to do the Gek missions I need to finish 2 of them to get the whatever from the Gek cartographer. Here's the problem: Whenever I take a mission or two from the Gek mission giving guy it never counts towards the Patterns In Time progress. I've so far done about 8 missions and quest progress still shows 0/2.

I can't re-start that quest unfortunately. The quest log tells me to access the guide, so I do that and the guide starts it's own quest to "guide" me to the mission board. I go to the mission board, pick up a mission and guess what? I now have two quests that doesn't register the bleeping mission board... So is this a common issue? Is my save f*cked and I have to make a new one?

Cheers for the response, at first I didn't check the icons at the missions I just picked up everything I could. Most of those missions end up being really tedious.
After reading your post I looked for the beak icons and done those but the mission board I was lead to by the quest marker still didn't give me any progress.
I gave up on it for a while and randomly jumped to another Gek system and boom as I walked to the Gek mission board the tutorial quest (the one that starts when you open the guide) got completed, I got 2 Gek missions done with those beak icons and they counted towards my progress, then talked to the Gek cartographer on that station and finished that step finally. Jumping to another system as far as I understand works like a refresh, creates a new instance maybe?
Anyways I'm glad to be rid of it finally.