In the film Ego explains that he needs to return home every now and then "Otherwise this form would perish". That doesn't seem to be too much of a problem for Ego as during his fight with the guardians he recreates his form multiple times. Why does he waste so much time returning back to the light when he could abandon/let that form perish and just send a new one, essentially reducing travel time by half.
Is there any reasoning behind this?
We know from his early life that he is the planet and not the person. "He" needs to return to the Light because he is basically doing puppetry with 10` poles. He is good at it, but he can't do everything and little errors will eventually accumulate and kill the puppet.
On his surface he is able to do whatever he really feels like and can easily fix anything as it comes up as well as catch up on any deferred maintenance. This is shown by how he states that Peter Quill will also have to return to the planet occasionally if he wants to live forever and the basic principle of Occam's Razor.
The planet is his battery. He sends his form like a feeler or tentacle.
Think of his body as a Roomba and the planet as electric socket with a Roomba charger and memory bank. Body walks around and does useful things but it has limited amount of "Light" energy and memory space. If the body doesn't return to recharge occasionally and make backups of memories in the planet, the memories that particular body had created and the knowledge it had collected since last recharge would perish.
