That's why ED feels like a PvE game with a not very thought about added on PvP part.
Mass locking ships is a good PvE mechanic, but not very PvP friendly. If a big ship interdicts you, you are dead in a smaller ship.
"Jump to SC" recharging your shields is simply one of the worst things I've ever seen in a PvP game.
Multipurpose ships being almost always the best combat ships while combat ships are power starved is ridiculous.
The insurance model is PvE friendly, but very PvP unfriendly. It simply favors those who played long enough to have enough money not to care about it while preventing players with less money from gaining experience. It's, in my opinion, the number one reason why so many players simply don't play in Open mode. In PvE it adds a bit of a punishment for doing stupid things that can be easily avoided. In PvP it simply prevents players form being able to participate in PvP.
You're not dead in a smaller ship - unless the big ship is a Clipper and you can't fight it off (and as a fighter, it's not all that good). Otherwise small ships are considerably faster. You boost out of weapon range and run away.
Multipurpose ships are just that - multipurpose. Between a Viper and a Cobra, or Vulture and an Asp (roughly combat and multipurpose of similar pricetag) it's pretty clear which is the better fighter.
Anyway, Elite: Dangerous has a very very very forgiving "punishment" for dying.
You get your ship back and all modules as well, for a very small price. Compare and contrast, to, say, EVE, where the poster obviously comes from, where you just lose it altogether. I've played EVE for a very long time, as a mostly solo pirate, and some of my record kills are multi-billion ships; this is approximately a month and so of someone grinding. In terms of RL money since in EVE you can trade in-game currency for game time cards, one of my kills lost the guy approximately 90$ at the going rate in the day. In a two minute fight. So excuse me if I laugh at this harsh punishment for PVP / ship loss in Elite. There's nothing harsh about it.
What made it so thrilling (in EvE) is that you could not only lose money fast, but also make money, because roughly half the modules dropped when you killed a ship. So when you'd get really lucky and run into someone with juicy very high value stuff, I could earn the loss cost of my pirate ship more then a dozen times over - and ordinarly fit ships also made a steady although low-ish profit.
The same thing which makes Elite PvP so forgiving - insurance for both ship and modules - also makes it rather low profit - you just get someone's bounty, and/or cargo if you shoot at the cargo hatch or use limpets. Since modules are insured they cannot be possibly salvaged in any way. It's how it is - game is still fun without meaningful PvP, though.
EVE has those modules and they are completely destroying PvP as it commits you to a battle to the death OR turns a fight into a long range shootout AND highspeed ships will have too great an advantage.
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Victory does not, and should not, always belong to the survivor.
They do not destroy PvP (that's redicilous to say, sorry). EvE is designed in a way that these modules work well and fit well into the game (ignoring the occasional balance screwup the creators make, but well, it's understandable in a MMO going on for so long). However including them here would profoundly change things, and I'm not convinced it would change things for the better at all.
Ideally I would like to get more reward out of PvP but it's realistically not going to happen, as players dread having to pay insurance already when they lose a ship. However Elite is fun enough as it is even without a well functioning / rewarding PvP part.
