Not on the cards at this point, I would agree. If the introduction of a karma system and a re-invigorated C&P system are sufficient to encourage sufficient* players back to Open then all well and good. If not then who knows what Frontier may have to do.
*: an unknown increase to an unknown population (as Frontier do not publish player numbers at all, much less per mode) that only Frontier can determine.
Honestly, I think they recognize that the C&P system is sub par but are hamstrung by different elements of the development team in an eternal fight for 1985 Nostalgia against modern online gaming expected mechanics.
Bounty Hunting was hamstrung by someone (I can't remember who) not wanting players to be able to exploit it. So the ability to apply a bounty to another player was left out, as well as the ability to collect more than 1,000,000 credits off of a player bounty that could potentially be in the hundreds of millions (I stopped my activities at Robigo with a Bounty of over 40 million credits). So the incentive to hunt other players down isn't there for a few reasons:
Exhibit A) In the amount of time it would take to track a player down using the current system. You could have made 10-20x more money doing simple trade or passenger missions.
That's just one example of how badly they've borked the multiplayer design of this game.
Frontier, and I'm sure they have, needs to take a look at what CCPs done to make EVE work as well as it does right now. CCPs system works and while ganking/griefing isn't unheard of, it's incredibly hard to pull off and the in-game rewards for doing so are non-existent. If they'd adopt a Concord like stance with System Security Forces or even added a Pilots Federation Security Force to do the ball busting but stayed away from the elements that make EVE truly embrace PvP (Kill boards, player kill tracking, etc) then I feel they could really get the ball rolling on a C&P system that benefits everyone.
I'm way the hell out in the black and the game still lists uninhabited, lifeless systems as "Low" security. C'mon FDev.. That's
NO security.
Hell, at this point, I'd take a simple switch from hollow to filled boxes as a bandaid.