And then there's the idea of this single engineer, let's take "Tod The Blaster", who requires us to hand in chunks of iron shot from rocks in order to improve our weapons. And not just our weapons, but he personally has to modify the weapons of all the players and now NPCs as well! One can head-canon that Tod just sits in his office while robots do all this work, but he's doing this for FREE while expecting us to bring him supplies that should be common (iron) but are not.
My explanation for this is that
none of the things we bring in are directly required to carry out the upgrades.
The iron doesn't get melted down to make a new bit of your weapon. The Focus Crystal ... or most of one, anyway ... you found floating in space doesn't get used directly to improve your weapon. They have bins of new focus crystals in the back if they need one. Similarly, they don't pin the analysis of that Datamined Wake Exception up inside your FSD so that the hamsters can read it.
All of these things are the costs of the module.
- raw materials, with data on which planet or ring system they came from, provide useful isotopic and prevalence data which can plan future major mining installations or carry out pure astrophysics research. Of course, to the pilots, they're just rocks, so they give them away almost for free. Suckers.
- manufactured materials salvaged from wreckage have been through years of use, and often treatment beyond the recommended capabilities (e.g. "do not store in an exploding ship"). The manufacturers won't release their info on this sort of beyond normal use performance - but an engineer with enough samples of used conductive components can derive their own. (If the blueprint they're upgrading for you requires a conductive component, they'll fit a fresh one, not some barely-above-scrap piece of battlefield salvage)
- data, likewise, provides interesting information that it would be tricky to obtain entirely legally from the big corporations. But the competitive advantage is greatest if they have exclusive rights - no selling the same DWE to Farseer and Martuuk
So you've got a bunch of private researchers who've managed to mostly duplicate the capabilities already available to official militaries, but not generally offered on the public markets ... who are using this knowledge to get further research and commercial data by bartering the upgrades they can do for additional info, in a way that doesn't show up in easily freezable credit accounts.
(For the Colonia engineers, what they're researching with this stuff is obvious - but then, they have backing and facilities provided by the Council. For the others, they presumably have their own secret agendas)
