I voted for 6, but add to this 2, 3 and 9
I've said this elsewhere - basically Skyrim in Space...
You can't make ED into Skyrim in space. It's not practical.
Fundamentally, you have two approaches to making games: authoring scripted content or creating systems. That is to say, you can either create everything the player experiences by hand, or you can create systems and everything the player experiences is born from those systems interacting.
In Skyrim, everything is created by hand. In Mount & Blade you experience similar(ish) gameplay, but systemically generated. Likewise Jagged Alliance vs. UFO, or indeed Elite vs. Wing Commander.
The advantage of scripting everything is that you get a much better defined narrative. The advantage of using systems is you can vastly increase the scale and the openness. In Mount & Blade, you can ally with any of the scores of Barons and Jarls, in Skyrim just the handful that are scripted for you to do so. In UFO you can fight anywhere in the world, in Jagged Alliance only the small country of Arulco. Elite is
colossal and very open. It can only do that because of the systemic approach. You'll never, ever fill this galaxy with Skyrim style, hand crafted missions and it's completely unrealistic to expect that they will. Star Citizen is coming along which will do this, and it will manage that by massively reducing the scale and openness.
Don't get me wrong, the systems ED runs on have room for a heck of a lot of improvement, but that should be the expectation, not that the game is miraculously turned into something impossible.
