Disclaimer: I haven't played this game for long, and I am definitely not "gud". I guess this is as much a question related to the difficulty upgrade as it is a complaint.
Since this was advertised as a sandbox game, I set out to play it for the exploration. I tried the combat stuff, and it doesn't really have too much appeal to me, so my main strategy would be to try escaping whenever I was interdicted. Before the update, it seemed like I could get away most of the time by submitting to the interdiction and trying to evade shots until the FSD had cooled down.
Maybe it is a coincidence, but since the update, all the ships that have interdicted me have killed me instantly. Basically, I get the message that my shield is down at the same time as the message that I am being attacked, and then I explode. If this is intentional, it is game mechanically the equivalent of having your ship randomly explode without any way of avoiding it. Sure, it adds some tension, but it is only coin-tossing, which gets boring after a while since there is no way of affecting the outcome. I would much prefer the challenge of exploration/trading/mining to be related to that style of playing the game instead of flipping a coin to see if you succeed.
Realism-wise, it also makes very little sense for these high-level pirates to attack me when I neither pose a threat to them (I am ranked "harmless" and they are usually ranked "deadly"), nor have anything they would be remotely interested in stealing. Is the game simulating griefers because the actual players are too honorable?
So my question is: Is this all because I am crap at games? Should I be able to avoid interdiction or escape? Am I traveling through star systems where I have no business being? If that is the case, then I can live with that, I guess. I will either learn how to play properly or find a different game. A tutorial on how would be appreciated, of course, but with the amounts of user-generated documentation out there, it might not even be necessary.
If it is not, then I would vote to either make the overpowered NPCs focus on people with comparable combat ships, or provide ways of escaping battle. This could very well be at the expense of being able to do combat at all (the weapons could be exchanged for some sort of interdiction protection or something.)
Anyway, just my two cents. I am still enjoying this game immensely, but I probably won't go on any long quests for thousands of light years as long as I know I have a 30% change of exploding right before I reach my base