Ya know what may help
Narrowing the void between players who have put in an exorbitant amount of time and those who have not. Making it more accessible for newer players to get involved in PvP and have the confidence to brave Open.
There are so many ways to do this. By slashing the numbers of mats and Ore required to unlock Engineers, increasing drop rates of rare materials. Balancing the numbers, so that you are not earning Modular Terminals at 4 a time, while needing 25. Delivering Brandy at 12 a time while needing 50, or Ale at 4 a trip whilst needing 25. All these little things that just tack on hours to an an already insane amount of work.
You'd think they were trying to sell you fast unlock but they aren't so it's unneeded.
People say it's because there's no game afterwards, but it's not true. The game, is afterwards. You make the credits so you can play game, you do the engineering so you can compete at the game and try out interesting builds.
Give players access to this in a more manageable amount of play time.
Why?
Well, a big difference in this game is that there is no match making. It's not like Dark Souls where you have a meta lvl that players don't go beyond, and where you're matched up with people within that range/weapon upgrade lvl.
It's a system that gives incentive to not get too OP so as to be able to play with (or even greif) as many people as possible. This game doesn't have that
Here you can be getting interdicted by people in fully engineered Corvettes while in a stock Sidewinder.
Because of this a PvP capable ship is required if you want to be remotely competitive.
Now the engineer grind is a time sink, an epic one.
When I decided to embark on building a single small PvP ready vessel, I wondered, could I do it in a few days if I played 9 hrs a day. No. 5 days? A week? No.
I played from around 7pm till around 4am almost everyday for a month. [This is not conducive to a healthy lifestyle.]
You can say I was doing it inefficiently, but I grabbed 'Adle's Armada - A Guide to Building a PvP Capable Ship', I bought the Conda and followed the shotgun approach. I did Palins 5000 ly trip in one session, I flew back and sold the data to Sirius for immediate Allied rep. I got a fellow member of my PP team to give me 15 modular terminals so I only had to get 10 and so on and so on. I did it efficiently and it took ages.
Between the needing to be allied with minor factions, acquiring system permits, the quantities of ore to be mind and materials to be found, the time spent traveling around the bubble and beyond. It's insane.
Not the jobs themselves, they are great and introduce you to mechanics and sights you may have otherwise never discovered..
But again, the balancing. The numbers are wrong.
You'll spend hours finding materials only to gamble them away on bad rolls at the Casino de RNGeers.
By the time I was half way through upgrading the small PvP ship, it was already near invincible in PvE, my shields wouldn't go down, my weapons were OP, and I wasn't close to ready for what the other Commanders were bringing.
This is an example of the poor balancing. Why the disparity between what's required for PvE and PvP?
Players don't need access to such OP equipment, and it just creates this massive void between people who have put in the hours and those who haven't, which discourages more people from playing in Open or even attempting to get involved in PvP.
I'm not saying nerf all our hard work. But you could make it more accessible to others in future. Encouraging people top join Open and try out new builds.
You could give everyone a paint job who has already unlocked all Engineers. It could be called "The Hardway", and we could talk about how tough it was in the old days. Like people talk about Bromellite now, "ya know, back when you had to mine it and you couldn't just do 15 passenger missions.", etc.
It's all good for me, I've done it. But if we want to encourage others into the world of Open we have to accept that there is a real disparity between the haves and the have nots and so little in the way of risk/reward balancing that only those with masses of time available and some degree of masochism are willing to give it a go.
o7 all.
Maybe one day you'll get a good enough rig to make it worth the bother 
