I think this is kind of on purpose.
I can think of two reasons for this. One is that in real life, being a driver, pilot or a captain of sorts can lead you to many kinds of work, which will feel disconnected and different. A long range hauler and someone who carries ore between the mine and the conveyor belt of the crusher are both truck drivers. We know these are connected in some way because we live in the real world and the variety in real life distracts us so we have to think in abstract ways to make connections. Elite is much simpler than real life obviously so the differences become jarring. That's normal.
And the second reason is, they designed the activities and gameplay styles distinctly because when they try to introduce passenger missions, people start crapping all over it, saying it's the same thing as hauling cargo but with a different menu in the stations. Well, whatever we do in this game we do from the seat of a spaceship so all the game is flying spaceships with a different skin right?
Of course I'm exaggerating and hauling passengers kinda should be a different type of cargo, just like in real life. The interaction should be subtly different, as there can be important details such as keeping tabs on the well being of individual passengers but that's not realistic to ask for at this point. Whatever they come up with, without making the game all about passengers will feel artificial and simple. There's simply no time for a very detailed passenger system yet with all the other stuff they planned ahead of time.
What they should do in time, with each new update is to connect more inputs and outputs to the BGS and make it make more sense. It already kinda makes sense but in a pretty static manner. If they can manage to make it more dynamic, such as implementing an actual simulation of supply and demand for individual systems so they produce and consume at different rates, even without player intervention, it will be awesome. I don't know how much of a database wizardry this requires so I'm not exactly sure how deep they can go but I wouldn't think it would be too much work, given that there are already very detailed simulations of complex economies with millions of inputs that you can run on your own computer.
Another thing which would improve interactivity is to implement new ways for people to meet, do things together and benefit from the interaction as a group. CGs are a simple but good example of this. If the pay is good, lots of people attend the CGs, some go in open to interact with each other, while others go in private but still the result from the community effort is visible. It's also worth your while most of the time. This interaction could be expanded upon by automated CG which are local and small scale, such as an effort of a few hours to haul some stuff to a certain system, or maybe from the system. As an example, a system could reveal they have a surplus of some goods they want to get rid of and they are selling it half the market price. This could be sent as in game mail to players within a certain radius of the mission giver system automatically. The same can be done for any kind of activity. Bounty hunting comes to mind. A randomly generated criminal is declared via in game mail to players within a certain radius of the system the criminal is seen and everyone who can find and scan the criminal gets some reward while the player(s) who manages to kill the NPC gets the bounty on its head, which should be substantial.
![[VR] Frank_G](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/59/59394.jpg?1553527111){kind=avatar}
