You guys seem to think there's a way to solve this.
There isn't.
Ask anyone in the fighting game community, where "combat logging" (quitting just before you're going to lose) has been a thing for a decade. P2P games can't differentiate between a forced disconnection (Alt+F4, ethernet cord removal, airplane mode) and real network problems (power outtages, temporary ISP service issues, DDoS attacks). They just can't. So what they do is things like this:
https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2016...ur-ban-and-1000-lp-loss-serial-rage-quitters/
In short, they monitor the *frequency* of quitting, then start to penalize based on frequency of quitting within a given time window. That is literally the best they can do because they don't want to punish people having real connection problems too severely, while understanding they also can't cater to people playing on unstable networks.
As far as I know, ED does this already. They know 100% when someone drops connection. I believe they do implement some punishments based on volume, including things like shadow bans. FDev is unlikely to ever make ships instantly explode for losing connection because the punishment is too hard in ED and I don't think there is enough motivation to let ships sit there for an extra 15-30 seconds getting pounded on after the owner has disconnected (for whatever reason). Loss of ship, loss of cargo, loss of exploration data, maybe loss of your entire economy if you can't cover buyback. I don't think FDev wants to to that even if they could.
This challenge is greater than what we see in fighting games which are designed for only PvP fighting and each match is only about a minute long; someone may only combat log in ED once in a month. Or once in a season. Or once a year. Where does the penalty system kick in for a game where the occurrence of an individual combat logging is probably close to 0? Do they get a warning after the very first detected lost connection and have to play petrified for the next hour/day/week in fear that any network problem could cause them to lose hours of time put into the game? I'd be surprised if any individual CMDR has combat logged more than 4 times in 12 months. That's well within any margin of error for network uptime, power disruptions, etc as far as infraction detection goes.
Imagine the volume of angry email messages coming into the Support desk. Would they ask for "proof" that there was a network problem before giving someone their losses back? What would that even look like? And note some losses (exploration data, cargo) can't come back even if they found in your favor; they can only give you their value. They'd have to double their Support staff.
Without a reliable way to differentiate quitters from network issues, there will never be a satisfactory resolution here. The best you can do is report people who suspiciously go missing. Beyond that...I don't know if you guys will ever be happy here.