you know there is no correlation between the harshness of penalties and crime incidence levels, right?
what demotivates crime is not the harshness of the punishment, but the predictability or even inevitability of it. you are really expecting frontier handing out perma bans solely based on youtube inspection?
even ignoring any experience with 'game admin' stuff until now, you realize those will need to be really (i mean really) blatant cases. meaning majority of them will go unpunished. meaning little chance of getting caught. and this is assuming a very diligent implication by frontier.
i completely agree with your concerns but i think your strategy needs a bit of work.
No, I for one am expecting frontier to improve the client with hardcoded plausibility checks to automaticaly detect hacks.
Take this example from the OP:
"When you line up a volley of 5 PAs on an FDL, no matter how good the build is, you're going to be doing a ton of damage. When those shots land and the shields sit at 100% for the next 3 minutes after you're dumping volley after volley into them, that's pretty easy to catch, right?"
The game client could easily and reliably detect the same discepancy between what should happening and what is happening. Just count the amount of hits with certain weapons, multiply it with weapon damage, subtract shield recharge and compare it with difference in shield strength. If a significant discrepancy appears: Permaban
Even better would be a crc-check, best make it delayed. If you manipulate the memory, wait a few weeks (that makes it very hard to catch during development of the hack) and then ban the account without warning.
No need to fumble around with youtube videos.