We have outposts that only have medium landing pads, good for small and medium ships only, surely that's a small ship activity, but what do we get, people demanding shuttles and/or docking tubes so they can take their big ships to them to offload cargo and take missions. Any activity FDEV try to introduce for small ships only will only be the target of players with big ships demanding a cut of the action. That's probably a major reason why nothing has happened, a similar thing happened with restricted ship slots. They have been the target of continued demands to be opened up for all sorts of non-restricted modules so now we don't get anymore.
Another thing that's restricted mainly to small and medium ships is the guardian ruins where people take big ships and try and land nearby and can't, then demand an open space so they can land their Conda, could they just take a medium or small ship, nope, first course of action is to complain on the forums about it being to hard to land a Conda near the ruins and why isn't there a proper Conda parking spot!
Point is I don't disagree with your post and it wouldn't bother me if there were small ship only activites, but with the current player base I just don't see it ever happening.
Thanks for the input. That's enlightening in respect to the history on this topic. I recently used a Python to run data courier mission between outposts to raise my Empire rank ,and it didn't occur to me that my very grinding is actually part of the discussion I raised.
Anyway, I think why people incline to take the big 4 with them on missions is the truth of ED at this moment is "bigger the ship, better the reward/shortest the time". Also, the logistic of ships makes it difficult to switch between them, and I think that also contributes to people's inclination to big ships, even though it is much better than the old days when the transfer option is not available. Again, the flaw in the reward system is due to the lack of specialization of ships in the game, especially compared to EVE online. How fast/efficient you complete missions/make money in the game is proportional to how big the ship you fly. If they can devise new gameplay that flying a smaller ship can just make as much credit and as fast as flying a big ship, players will have more reasons to fly smaller ships.
I can understand why people can get frustrated why they cannot find a landing space for their Conda for the logistic reason I mention above, it could be even more irritated when there is no shipyard in hundreds of LY for one to switch their ships(that is usually the case with alien sites). The root of this problem is the landing info of planets is nowhere to be found. And I think that is one of the reasons why the landing pad info has been made more accessible in the navigation panel, so players can know what they are flying into. Anyway, this is more of a side note of the imbalance between big/small ships.
Can they hire a top game/level designer from Larian Studios or Blizzards? I think all of us can agree the glaring lack of depth or variety of gameplay in ED when compared to other established franchise. And ED has been around for almost five years. There really is no excuse for this.