So to elaborate a bit on my laconic answer earlier:
On collisions:
Flying even the biggest and most cumbersome ship is trivial, since you only have to keep track of your speed vector and where your ship is pointing. Planets only add another vector to the equation, nothing particularly difficult. Why is it, then, that for such a simple activity, the game punishes us so little for collisions? Whether it be colliding with the back of the station or with the ground, a full speed collision should send you to the rebuy screen. Instead, it will typically take one or two rings off your shield, with no lasting consequences. In my mind, if you fail at a simple task, surely you should get a proper slap.
On interdictions and the general level of threat in supercruise:
NPC interdictions are broken. It takes either a bug or a player particularly engrossed with whatever it is they are watching on the second monitor to fail an interdiction against an NPC. And in the unlikely event that you actually try and fail your way throug hthe interdiction minigame...you can always submit before it's over and high-wake out. No pirate is going to seriously dent the shield of even a properly fitted Type-7. And if like me you're a pirate, you have long since stopped caring about the authorities too. We need more ATR-level NPCs offering a semblance of threat, because those are the only ones that can actually kill a player who at least tries to survive (and that's from a player who doesn't use Engineers and doesn't fly big ships) . And by that, I mean we also need pirates and bounty hunters NPCs sporting this sort of firepower, just about everywhere where it makes sense to have those.
On sentries:
Whoever actually needs to put in any effort when they come across those POIs with 3-4 sentries guarding some cargo pods on planet surfaces?? Usually they all die before they can even react and open fire. And considering how weak their weapons are and how dumb they are when you have terrain to hide behind... why even have them?
On smuggling:
Sandro described how NPCs can visually spot the player, allowing you to actually sneak inside stations unnoticed by reducing your emissions and avoiding their cone of vision. He also revealed ships have a conspicuous rating, making the police less likely to scan some ships... but what is the point of all of that when police NPCs simply can't react in time to the player flying straight in at ~250m/s, which even a Type 9 can easily achieve? It feels like such a waste to have these stealth elements go to waste because you can, without much skill needed, just power through and not care about any of that. And of course, the consequences are trivial: fines are a little bit more of a pain with the new C&P (barely), but clearly not enough to justify how much you need to mess up to let yourself be scanned.
Bounties?
Bounties still barely register in my gameplay. Police NPCs in normal space are too slow to react, and lack the teeth to do anything about your bounty anyway, even (or particularly) around stations. And in Supercruise, of course they rely on the broken interdiction mechanics so you never have to fear them there.
The game can be made difficult as you want it to be. You can kill a harmless Sidewinder or try solo a Medusa flying an Imperial Eagle.
Better of doing that than putting people off the game because it's too difficult.
Players who don't feel challenged by a game rarely bother adding difficulty to it artificially. They just don't play.
