Elite does not have a lot of the things that other multiplayer games have, I'm not sure if it's intentional or not.
Like, it might be nice to be able to create a chat channel, and invite people into it, because, of things like Player A and Player B are friends. Player B and Player C are friends, but Player A and Player C don't know each other. Having a chat channel along with their mutual friend B, allows them to talk to each other, and introduce themselves.
Navigating the friends list can be a bit awkward too, sometimes.
But, maybe having such a chat channel would take away from the intended atmosphere of the game. Maybe you're supposed to feel isolated and alone in space ?
And for npc generated content - Elite has 30 odd years of backstory to it by now, there's some kind of story that is going to occur in the future, with Thargoids or something, maybe, and I think maybe Frontier wants people to be interested primarily in that story, and less so about clan/guild/organisation drama stories. Like, in other games, the vast majority of the players are more interested in the Group X vs Group Y stories, and the entirety of the npc factions and the background story is dismissed as "lol, lore", or "lol, rp".
Like, maybe Frontier wants the story of Elite to be the thing that makes people choose it, rather than any of the other space sim type games, and is wary of anything that could overshadow that.
some comments about this kind of thing, have mentioned wanting "mmo industry standard" things, which I dunno, why must every game be p.much the same apart from the visuals ? Like, there's mmos where you outfit a magic warrior dude, and mmos where you outfit a scifi fighting robot, but they play exactly the same, more or less. Only the visual setting differentiates them.