I think the narrative direction of the game changed somewhere. The line that kicked the game off was "Hengist Duval is dead". It's a weighty line filled with potential. Succession, succession wars, pretenders, the possible overturning of the long stable situation with the Federation. Instead what we got was a damp squib and the galaxy turned over to PMFs.
I think their original plot plans had three major flaws.
1) The usual problem with their massive optimism over how long things would take to develop in terms of game features
at best completely wrecking pacing and in some cases likely requiring a complete change of direction.
2) They seemed to want to tell a "space illuminati" conspiracy story, but because of the nature of the game, then set it from the perspective of the average resident for whom the entire existence of the conspiracy is way above their pay grade. So you get some stuff around the Imperial succession and the destruction of Starship One, with vague hints that the killers weren't just lone terrorists, but without any plausible way to reveal any of what's really going on later on. And they massively overestimated the proportion of players who'd notice or care. "Oh, there's a giant shadowy conspiracy, is there? Do they do anything we'd notice? No? Okay, back to hauling, then. I'm sure this furthers their non-specifically sinister plans in some way which will never be revealed but I can't be bothered to care about that."
3) It's an in-game story so it needs to incorporate player activity at least at some level, or what you actually want to do is publish a non-interactive book for people to read because that's way easier (right, Olav?). But player activity (aggregated, especially) either doesn't go anywhere narratively interesting, or if it does, goes somewhere inconvenient for telling any "managed" story. The Empire captured the Federal permit system of Beta Hydri very early in the original Powerplay ... and there was nothing Frontier could usefully do from there: responding to it starts a hot war they didn't have the technology to deliver at the time; ignoring it is also obviously silly.
By the time they'd figured all that out it was far too late to start over.
(Though the NMLA storyline in 2020-2021
did avoid all of that to tell a workable story - with a conspiracy and threats to the Emperor! - within the scope of Elite Dangerous)
Even now CGs are stepping on PPs toes, but you can see the move now where FD want self contained 'loose Lego' where its the players doing the building.
Yes. I can see potential outcomes where CGs and such are used to "stir the pot" if the temperature in Powerplay gets too cold and people get too used to stable borders.
But they'd need to firstly have the default temperature of Powerplay be high enough to have nitrogen evaporate.
