Ok, clearly the advantages are lost on all of you :
If people had official alts, instead of multiple games :
1) You could provide a UI to switch without having to quit the game and login again. Your login credentials can be stored as normal. If you have two copies of the game, you need to quit and switch users in the launcher, which was built to assume you only have one user account.
2) If you have a season pass or have backed the game, not to mention all the cosmetic stuff from the store, can then be shared to the alt account.
3) If people misbehave using a second copy of the game, only that copy of the game can be banned. If people misbehave on an alt, the whole account including alts can be sanctioned. So it's worthwile for FDEV to "know" if you are using an alt.
4) Considering how the game works, specifically: the thargoid reveals and the community goals and having a bubble and a colonia area and in general having travel times of half an hour between "interesting things", swapping between tasks is time consuming. Having alts would officially mean "We want you to be able to participate in everything". So being able to "spawn" elsewhere in the galaxy at the click of a button makes sense. Multicrew is sort of like halfway there to accomplishing this, except it doesn't work for singleplayer and you don't get the full benefits/possibilities of having your own ship there.
5)Probably everybody has multiple ships, having official "alts", meaning alternate Holo-me characters, would let you start at the location of one of your other ships. It would make much better use of your fleet.
6) Forget I ever said 5%. It was an arbitrary number, all I wanted to say is, "a discount compared to the full game, at whatever price it is available, but expensive enough to keep trolls from coming back everytime their character gets kicked" (also see point 3).
7) By treating a commander account as a company with multiple characters, it's easier to explain surviving crashing into a sun or a black hole.
8) As mentioned earlier, backers have multiple ways to "start" the game. There's the sidewinder, but also the option to start with an eagle or cobra explorer. Given that you probably never wipe your account, these starter ships have gone to waste. Being able to use alts could give them some meaning again.