Interesting post. As a photographer I've done quite a lot of wildlife photography for Nat Geo, and the main reason we don't intervene is due to nature. That Leopard needs to eat, its not really comparable to PVP in Elite because they don't need to kill anyone they are doing it for fun, which in my book is totally fair enough.
I disagree that the skill gap is at all big in this game, but i'll try to explain why.
The best way i can think to describe the PVP vs PVE community in Elite is like this:
Where as in the vast majority of other games its more like this:
I've said this before but i believe ED is trying to appeal to the masses, but ED is primarily a PVE game. Its a fact that this game is mostly played by an older age range, more mature people who want to play a more relaxed sandbox. That is fine btw, I've always enjoyed a healthy mix of hardcore games with sophisticated ones. I've raked up more than my fair share of hours in flight sims and sub sims.
The gradients i showed above show how PVPers and PVEers clash in Elite compared to other games. Lets take Eve for example, most people wanted big fights and battles, and power. Some didn't, but they knew full well that the game was designed around such content and even the industry minded person who didn't PVP AT ALL and focused purely on cornering the market and being a tycoon never complained about PVP the way people do in Elite, even though when they lost in that game they lost BIG where as in this game you lose barely nothing.
Going back to my original point; the skill gap isn't as huge as other games by far, Eve, even Arena in WoW it could take years to master and some people never could the skill gap was just SO high, look at SC2 for example.
If you imagine a group of Lions fighting a group of Tigers, you've got yourself a competitive game like those previously mentioned with a massive skill cap. If you picture a group of Lions in with a group of Meercats, you've got Elite. You've got people who focus entirely on PVP like SDC, CODE etc in a universe full of primarily PVE oriented people who just want to make friends, be social and enjoy the universe, its like fire and petrol. What im saying is you dont have to be good in this game to beat people who dont want combat, you just have to want combat...
I don't mean this as a dig but its not that these PVP groups are so good at all, they would likely be totally out-matched and not at all as infamous in a game with a primarily PVP competitive community, they just are in Elite because they have picked the rarer role in a PVE oriented game.
There is something fundamentally wrong with Elite in regards to this and I've always said i believe its due to them trying to expand their target audience to everyone, they want the competitive world of Eve inside their primarily PVE chilled universe and it dosent work imho.
