Though i find the act of killing unarmed/unengineered ships distasteful, why exactly should it?
If people have a different point of veiw then they can avoid the players who will shoot at them. Same as the rest of the community does.
The running trend here, as far as I can tell and regarding these threads is that the most vocal about the distasteful side of PvP are often the ones who got killed, and instead of taking on board the advice, got salty and went about it "thier way" instead of adjusting to the challenges other players might represent and suffered the consequences of not making the sensible choices.
Once again, though it's been said many times, the game provides you with everything you need to escape from any kind of PvP with nothing but scratches. It's about applied logic.
Even in an Eagle, a wing of 4 is going to struggle to kill you before you've submitted and high waked elsewhere. Hell, I even test this regualrly with a basic engineered hauler (Thrusters + Distro @ G3) and seldom ever get killed unless I decide to be a . All the tools are there and often require little to no engineering.
There was one question that OP has asked: Is nonconsensual PvP problematic in this game.
Of course PvPers say it's not, PvEers say it is, I say it's hard to say, but PvPers that converge on known locations like CG or starter system tend to do what they did during last FDev stream - be annoying and actually scare many people out of Open. Later we can find threads like "Dear Solo and PG CMDRs..."
Come play in Open, we have cookies
This is probably half serious, but not as much as they would like us to think - they refuse to make any kind of concession to other players and are left alone to bite eachother. And it's a waste of space. Litrerally. Whole galaxy in one mode for guys that pretty much gather in one or two places.
Whole discussion on whether it is ok to attack other players that don't want PvP is pretty much pointless. If they can, they will.
I tried to convince them that if they do, they should make it interesting, so even if I get blown up in the end I'll be entertained enough to not avoid them by playing Solo.
To this I was told that it is my job to do that, make my ship capable of defending itself and learn how to high wake.
And I was unable to explain that that is not the point. That I like being blown up. Escaping is not my objective, because I can always NOT PLAY IN THE OPEN! That I like (well, sort of) playing a trader in crappy ship that gets ed up. But if it takes 5 seconds every time and noone is even trying to talk, then it's boring and not worth my time.