What I don't get is the salty pvp crowd complaining there is no proper pvp set up when CQC is staring right at them.
Remember CQC where you can battle other players on equal terms .
So ... I like CQC a lot. Lots of fun, fast paced, unforgiving of mistakes (so I die a lot...), and has just enough regulars I don't have trouble getting a match these days.
However. It's extremely limited in the sorts of fights you can have. I don't mean "fair" rather than "unfair" - but in other respects:
1) Only modes are 4v4 team games or 8-way free-for-all brawl. No 2v1 (but the 1 gets a bigger ship). No 1v1 for that matter, unless you manage to find an out of the way spot in a free-for-all. Certainly nothing more complex like "escort the trader". There's a Capture The Flag mode for very basic "defend/attack the objective" play, but that's about it.
2) No way to arrange a match between two specific teams. You can construct two teams with the squad feature (though the squad lead must be friends already with all members of the squad) but the only way to match that versus another team is to both hit "team deathmatch" at once and hope you get lucky
3) Limited to four ships with an extremely limited weapon selection (pulse lasers and maybe in some situations beam lasers being the only decent ones) and most of the loadout variants being poor. Nothing with more than 2 hardpoints, or with truly fixed weapons (or turrets, to go the other way)
4) Limited to four maps - which are certainly more interesting than the average "deep space" encounter in the main game, but obviously get a bit repetitive.
5) All fights have exactly zero effect on the rest of the game universe. PvP is certainly an ineffective BGS or Powerplay tactic relative to PvE, but at least it does something. CQC by design has no in-game effect.
It would need a lot of expansion before it could substitute for the breadth of options main game PvP had, and I doubt that FDev putting that much effort into it would be taken well by most players...