Fdev's Mjolnir Nerfen Hammer has broke, and failed to fix the "EGG" exploit in patch 2. Now they have crafted, "Exploit breaker" , a new and more powerful "nurfenhammer".
Not sure i'd call smarter instancing logic a nerf hammer. The current instancing is stupid simple ..hence the various ways it's been exploited over the years.
If things an instance spawns are procedural, then it should be simple to fingerprint objects in them as you interact with them and destroy them or use them up in some way. If the client stores this as part of the gamestate then any attempt to re-instance will reference that data and for all matching fingerprints, update the new data to match. not only do you have semi-persistent instances (with some time cutoff) but it impacts everything procedural for the previous instance. Improving the quality of the instance.
it would make quickly and easily being able to jump in and out / logging off and in / or simply travelling far away and back impossible to reset the instance. Even going into supercruise and coming back wont help if you're returning to the same location. It would be saved as part of your game file (all instances in the last hour) and in ram. And if you tried to delete that data the client can phone home about that and if it's something that happens frequently, you would be assumed to be cheating the system and flagged.
Even rng could be handled in a semi-persistent way with this data. The code that triggers the rng function to spawn npcs or whatever can consider the previous log of that particular instance in what the player did and alter the rng spawning of new items. Eliminating re-rolling and allowing the game to look like actions you previously did (at least in recent history) have an impact that exists beyond your instance. Farming pirates? Well on top of reputation changes ...the code can look at how many pirates you've recently killed in this instance (if it was recent) and spawn something special for you to make things harder, or have the instance not spawn pirates because they're afraid. Forcing players to move around instead of farming a single location.