The maxim in EvE was "if you're in a fair fight you are going it wrong" To me true PvP'ers are the guys who want to compete with equally equipped and skilled players. E.g, tournament style or in conflict zones where everyone has brought their best combat ship and is prepared to fight and die. The rest (and unfortunately the majority) are just looking for easy kills to feed their ego. I'm happy to go head to head if my opponent wants to dance but I just wouldn't blow some guy up in a trader just to give my ego a boost. Thats just a bit pathetic
"If you're in a fair fight you are going it wrong" doesn't mean you can't be in the same ship with same modules than your target, it means that you don't attack from the front but the back, simply put, you try to control the fight as much as you can. That passive aggressive about "true / pathetic" pvp just means you got no idea why, and how people do it. I touched on the nature of pvp in this game, probably in the thread OP describes, and it really, really hasn't anything to do with honor and equality. It's hunt or be hunted, and both roles are fun. And that's how it's supposed to be. If you want your so called "true-pvp" go play BF. We're all doing business here (or should be, "psycho's" are different but then again, nothing we can do about that), and like traders buy low and sell high, pirates bite the small ones instead of the big ones.
But, I completely agree with OP with the fact that pirates don't have enough reasons to be cowards. Where traders need to calculate risk and reward, so should pirates. You don't see drug dealers running in city centrals beating up people and then ask if they want to buy their product, that's bad business because it draws
heat. And it's not just the popo's who get mad at the punch swinging evildoer, their respective criminal organization get's mad too. And that's something that is missing from the game mechanics, and one of the three major problems in the trader-pirate-bountyhunter trinity.
Attacking traders drives trade out, tightens security measures and draws bounty hunters in a system, which is bad for criminal business. So each committed crime needs to make enough profit to compensate for that. Maintaining that chaotic balance is the lifeline of pirating. So a plain murder shouldn't be punished by the system government only, but the criminal organization too. Kill a trader and steal the cargo: cargo items get flagged as homicide evidence and should be worth a lot less. Kill a trader without cargo and hits the fan. Black markets block you unless you pay a compensation fine, become a mass murderer and the criminal organization dispatches assassins to get rid of you through bulletin board missions. Make bounties unremovable through paying fines, maybe add some kind of a fake ID system that helps you hide your wanted status. Buff clean pirating, nerf psychos.
The second major problem is the equipment. Playing RP-pirate or even using a cargo scanner is super cumbersome because you're giving your target too much leeway. The same goes with KWS. Which has lead to the situation: shoot first, ask later. This has to change, either enable cargo scanner and kws in supercruise or balance the speed of their use. System wide bounty lists for bounty hunters and bulletin board kill cmdr missions that has a system tracker and a hefty paycheck.
The third major problem is open vs. solo trading. There needs to be a carrot to do it in open. And I'm not talking about a simple station buy price buff, that's just clumsy and "unrealistic". A better way would be to make some kind of a meaningful interaction for traders against pirates in a case by case manner. Get pirated, get something. Bait missions with location trackers in cargo that light up the pirate for all using kws for example. Make stuff like that a part of a cargo insurance system. The problem with that is how to prevent exploitation of that system. But again, Frontier should have people to crack nuts like that.
