I agree with all your points except this. As I have said before Murder should absolutely be a valid career path and should steadily unlock equipment, engineers and bases down a "terrorist" route (vs CMDRs or NPCs of course).
All this should also be tied into the other valid careers that need some love - Piracy, Bounty Hunting and (to a certain extent) Trading (e.g. trading in low-sec should be really "84 in Reidquat" risky, with the ability to buy drugs at 1-2 credits per tonne for resale somewhere square of 5-10,000 credits per ton). These should all ideally form a virtuous cycle with perks for each.
Then we have the Security rating of a system - High Security should be equivalent to 5 stars in GTA for a notorious terrorist CMDR - continual harrassment by high powered NPCs (with the dream being that Bounty Hunting CMDRs at a certain level can telepresence into NPC ships and take over PvP duties).
#keepdreaming
I totally agree that there should various career paths, that gives some direct bonuses and challenges.
The easy go route is to be a law abiding pilot, then most bad stuff comes from the criminals, and as you so nicely added, flying in high security systems should be relatively safe, as the criminals have to constantly evade law enforcement.
If anyone venture deep into anarchy space, then there is no rules or law, anything goes, that is why it is anarchy space.
Now, there are some key elements that will create some real issues, engineers are often placed in high security systems, so being a criminal could mean some challenges getting to the engineers, the engineers themselves do not really care about who they are serving....
So perhaps we need to add a few other more engineers that located in anarchy space to offer these services to the criminal customers, and they offer G5 upgrades for stuff that are good for piracy, like faster manifest scanners, etc.
Give players to choices to go down certain routes, and reap all the benefits and also have to account consequences their choices brings.
So being a hit man, smuggler, pirate, etc, have their place in this galaxy, and that 50 million piracy mission, to go and track down a trader and steal some highly valuable goods in a high security system could prove to be a real challenge, can track it, disable it, and wrangle out 50T of the carg and pick it up, before the ATR arrives? you know cheating NPCs using stuff like G7+ engineered ships, using stuff we can only dream off, that will outfly you on specs, out gun you in power, and most importantly, out number you, as they will not fly alone.
Big pay day for a big challenge. This is the sort stuff I want to see.
And for the law abiding pilots, delivering gods to anarchy systems will pay ALOT more than to a high security system, do you have what it takes to make the delivery! And of course there are some corporate black ops pirates out there with stolen tech that will make your task a bit more interesting... see them as ATR tech gone rouge...
So encouragement for "both" sides to enter "dangerous" territory. So it should not matter if we do it in solo or open... it would like this to be a challenge.
There are ALOT of potential of giving us the foundation to actually play the bad guys, and that is without considering what this could do for PvP events and interactions. As getting ganked in a high security system should be very rare, as the game design now would push out the gankers from these systems, but players flying into anarchy space should mean that you are now fair game for this kind of engagement, and we could add some bells and whistles to alert players about this potential dangerous place you are travelling too. I am sure we are gong to see alot of players who complains that they took this lucrative mission and then got blown up by 2 super engineered pirate Anaconda within seconds, just like they complain about the 100k+ LS super cruise travel they have todo in some systems.... stuff that is shown when you pick the mission (there are some exceptions... but the hints are still there)
