Tradition is never a convincing argument to me, it's too arbitrary, rigid, and doesn't allow for needed changes. Either a mechanic makes intrinsic logical sense or it doesn't. Change by itself isn't bad, but by the standard you propose, all significant change with consequences would be bad change (at least initially).
So instead, think about it intrinsically: If you had never played the game before, and you shot a cop and the game said, "hey dude, congrats you're wanted now!" Then you surely wouldn't be surprised by this. But since players have been getting away with violently reckless and lawless antisocial behavior for years, we now have a warped expectation that you can just bribe officials in a high security system and be on your merry way. Or just ignore fines altogether! No other game allows you to run rough shod over the law like we do in Elite, and now the game has adopted a more universal standard of logical consequences, people are crying foul.
The only people losing their ship are veterans who were min-maxing their power/weight/speed ratios (ie people who should have known better), and new players who don't have that warped expectation that veterans have, and are losing maybe a few hours of progress at most (ie essentially nothing significant in the long run).
