The obscurity of BGS mechanics is not explained very well or at all, possibly deliberately, and makes for some faith-based play, where rumors and lore passed down from older BGS players is treated as gospel. For a space game, that's literally insane and leads to boring repetition that burns out players.
BGS opened up a lot of game loops to me, and made Elite a whole bunch more enjoyable, but I "know" that certain game loops have more impact because that was passed down to me as "gospel". Many of these "known facts" are probably 90-95% wrong, but we just don't know. Imagine if more BGS players explored more game loops because they knew that any further efforts in one game loop would be a waste of their time compared to turning to another game loop or to move to a new system, such as exploration or combat or rescuing distress calls. We discovered that the trade, political, and combat stats in the powerplay area are an analog to how things have shifted just for our faction, but it's not easy to determine the overall effect on system influence or security.
As there are limited numbers of folks available to most factions, means there is a lot of wasted game play. Could BGS be updated to be like PowerPlay, where it's known how far you've reached a soft cap or other limit, so that folks can spread their game loops around a bit more? Second BGS question - will BGS ever be linked to lore? We have a few factions related to the "Club", a supposedly lore related secret society, but BGS has no interaction with the underlying Elite universe. It's just a series of discrete actions. It would be great if we could push lore forward via BGS activity. One easy example is ensuring that Thargoid bonds also effect BGS, or ensuring that CGs have BGS and lore based movements.