No it's totally different, not least because Drew is not a Frontier employee. "The Hunt" you refer to was a storyline created by Frontier, promoted by Frontier and run by Frontier. It was similar to many riddles and treasure hunts that they have done. I certainly don't remember any mention of "Advanced NPCs" or "a lifetime's supply of narcotics".
But as has been evidenced here, and elsewhere Drew's use of the term 'new interactive NPC' already has people thinking that it's Frontier run and using new tech. The very fact that you say it's consistent with what Frontier did infers that the use of the term has been done specifically to make people think that.
I don't think Drew is being intentionally disengenious, I think he's simply trying to make a polished event for us, as evidenced by the composition of a trailer with its own unique retro synthwave theme tune, and the terminology may have inadvertently transcended from sounding "polished" to sounding "official". At worst his enthusiasm for a high quality event might have inadvertently made it sound more official than we currently believe it really is. But I would like to point out that Drew is off contract from FDev, and doesn't have another Elite book in the pipeline as he did with premonition/Salomé event, and is therefore most likely doing this out of the goodness of his heart to stir up some fun, or at worst he's proving a point to Frontier along the lines of "just because we killed Salomé, doesn't mean I can't make more great stories for you." Either way, while some might get confused by the gemini cricket style animated "advanced NPC", I'm not going to get upset about the wording.
Going back to "The Hunt" - I've fact checked myself and corrected a few points with strikethrough formatting in the following sentences, but there were
two three staff acted characters, who were
brothers in a gang. This three were the centre of the storyline, with each character's the story was they had stumbled on a downed thargoid ship in the pleiades, and wanted to milk this discovery, demands almost being like a CG(s?) they released their clues when their demands were met. So each gang member had a set of demands, and one of them was for narcotics, that I can confirm, the figure of 600t rings a bell to me, but slightly hazy on it.
From galnet on 31st of 3302 -
https://community.elitedangerous.com/galnet/31-AUG-3302 - I found this little summary:
Solving these clues led pilots to the three members of the Granger Gang: Otto Granger, Mahina Dillon and Logan Khol. When confronted, Granger and his companions claimed to have made a discovery of profound importance, but they refused to reveal the nature or location of this discovery.
Instead, each member of the gang said they would issue a request for a specific commodity, promising to reveal further information if they received what they asked for. Logan Khol's subsequent request for narcotics was enthusiastically received by the galactic community, and when his targets were met, a further clue was released:
These characters were, as far as I can recall, FDev staff playing as "advanced NPC's", and their clues and demands weren't whapped onto galnet or community goals section of mission boards, they were direct/local chat to players in instance with them, and the players then disseminated the messages/clue/demands, and we did our usual thing, making discord channels, spreadsheets, reddit threads etc, and proved ourselves too smart for frontier:
Although the Granger Gang planned to release further clues, they were quickly rendered redundant. Within hours of Khol releasing his information to the public, Commanders Noctrach and Ihazevich discovered the mysterious wreckage.
Yep! They underestimated us again... If I mind this right this happened not long before one of our lot triangulated the location of the guardians site in a trailer by looking at the skybox, and sort of shortcut the 2.3 narative¿
