the game was initially built under the incorrect assumption that players would only use in-game data and their own personal records of that data to find and take advantage of things. You can see it everywhere from the fog of info in markets and exploration, to the local news and the extremely simplistic economy and of course "rares". it's almost like it was designed as a single player game and then MMO was added without revisiting any of that. Fdev did not plan at all for the almost immediate solution players had to wasting hours of time blindly trying to find (and keep updated) things by creating databases that crowd sourced the info from all the players playing the shared galaxy. Once that started happening, the way these mechanics worked to control income and give a sense of personal achievement in these simplistic functions become entirely ineffectual and really dont make any sense.
instead of fighting that, fdev decided to support it with journals and the third party api. but they left all the existing game design that still pretended that players didn't have access to everything all of the other players have found/seen/know. And the lack of content addition means they have a real problem reigning in reverse inflation because that puts pressure on adding more fun things if you're gonna tell players that it's going to take them 2-10 times longer to acquire the funds to purchase something. So we're not going to be able to make rares relevant by reigning in income and buffing their income would still make them irrelevant due to the special rules around them.
For rares, i dont think there's any point in trying to make it have value credit-wise. Instead, rares could be the commodity req for all engineers. Every engineer needs a specific kind or assortment of rares. That's what they'll be used for primarily.
The other use for rares could be a pirate distraction tool. Dont want to fight a pirate and dont want to give up a bunch of commodity you do care about and can't run away? Drop a single rare (any kind) and the pirate will be guaranteed to ignore you while they go and grab the rare, giving you enough time to escape and they wont continue chasing you. Making it advantageous for traders to keep a few on them at all times like a defensive weapon.
