I just think [Eve Online's] economy and supply chain is fascinating and have always wished Elite had something akin to this.
You know, a fully dynamic economy on Elite wouldn't work: Hardwar was an excellent experiment in this. It was an Elite-like game, just set on Titan instead of in space, set on a much smaller world (I'd estimate it'd equal about fifteen or so ED systems), with a complex economy driven by NPC actors. It also had support for persistent world multiplayer. Now, the base game had a semi-dynamic economy: most of everything needed to be produced, but there were price caps coded in, and a few things had magical supply too. Imagine if you couldn't just buy an infinite amount of Anacondas and other ships, but every single ship, or even missile, had to be assembled first, and would go out of stock.
Well, in Hardwar SP, even on the semi-dynamic economy, a fair number of things would quickly become unavailable without player intervention. The police themselves would go extinct surprisingly soon! (Because they couldn't replace the ships that they lost.) Then in multiplayer, just one player or two could completely wreck the economy of a server.
Now, some later beta patches actually introduced a fully dynamic economy to the game, where only the basic raw materials would have an infinite supply, no price caps on the rest, and so on. Even without players setting up their own factories (a feature that was added after launch), it was chaos: small imbalances would soon spiral out of control. Add to that hostile players in multiplayer, and yeah, it wasn't much fun.
Eve's economy works because it's purely player driven. Introduce NPC actors to help keep an economy going, and things will be bad even in SP, let alone MP - too many complex parts to balance. In your advertised game, X4 Foundations, back at launch, I remember that the economy would rather quickly stall too, and that's just single player. Looking at things now, they mostly fixed that much later than I stopped playing it, and looks like they did it mostly by magicing some things on the supply side too. Now, in ED, the game world of twenty thousand inhabited systems is too large for a purely player-driven economy like Eve's (not to mention the existence of solo mode) - so all we'd have would be the other options.
Well, would you like to play in a version of Elite where you can't progress beyond your starter ship and equipment, or couldn't even reload your ammo, because most places have run dry and the ones that do still have supply are locked down by large player factions for their own usage only? That doesn't sound like much fun to me. I'm sure there are players who that would appeal to, but I don't think the majority would find it fun.
