So something I'm gathering here is that PvP is further viewed as unfair because relative to PvE it's such a difficulty spike. This means that (as the thread demonstrates) a player unused to PvP perceives the easiness of NPCs as the norm, naturally leading to most everything else seeming unbalanced and broken. In other words, Solo and Open are not gameplay-symmetric, which (ignoring factors like social engagement) means you really have a game with two 'difficulty settings', with the dev team assuming that balance passes for one affect the other just as much.
Just for a bit of lazy math fun, a stock Sidewinder has 108 absolute HP. One favoring well-rounded defenses and a boatload of Heavy Duty HRP's w/ Deep Plating (Reactive armor w/ HD and Deep Plating as well for funsies), less a C2 for a Bi-Weave and a C1 with Thermal Resistance+Angled Plating, has 1373 absolute HP with 2370 Explosive / 2449 Kinetic / 2490 Thermal effective hitpoints. That's a hair shy of 13x its base hitpoints. You go shoot damn near any Sidey-bot/PvE AI ship and they will virtually never be anything like that tough. 90% of your TTK will be down to missing the thing 'cause it's tiny rather than any sort of durability. You fly unengineered ships against those unengineered/garbage build bots and the game feels like something out of Star Wars, zipping around and getting on a bot's tail long enough to smoke them then peel off after another fighter. Against something engineered you're looking at needing a solid minute's worth of firepower on target to kill it in most instances, or much, much longer.
PvP combat ships (talking, specifically heavily engineered with very competent loadouts, not a G1 Clean Drive here, a sturdy weapon there, etc.) are pretty easily 8-10x as tough as anything you're likely to run across outside of the highest-tier Conflict Zone ships (the elite squadrons in particular) when it comes to any given model of ship, throw around 40%-60% more firepower, and with competent players are generally tremendously more aggressive than the AI while being better at both keeping their weapons on target when they need to be while keeping yours off target. The stuff you see in most HazRez (and especially lower) or pirate signals or just random interdiction that you're like to run across just doesn't rock that kind of survivability and firepower.
I mean, hell, half the time the AI ships will be trying to do the old "lets have a bunch of different weapons for different purposes" approach to loadouts. You'll bump in a Gunship with just about every hardpoint having a different weapon with every type of aiming mechanic represented. I mean, okay, they're poor and just scraping together what they can, fine. Lore or immersion or some $@#%, but they are
far removed from what you can reasonably expect from the middle-to-top end of ship capabilities.
I have cut up newbie ships in the Challenger that folded in around 20 seconds of sustained fire, flying just an all-gimbals multicannon potato boat. 20 seconds. They've been everything from Sidewinders to Vultures to Type 7's to one incredibly over confident FdL and a couple of Anacondas that thought they were invincible because they heard it was the hotness (well, they combat logged, but still). Mind, this ain't a humblebrag, I'm not looking for a fair fight and doing so with intent (malice varies from day to day). Even competent ships with competent pilots I can be pretty reasonably sure aren't going to kill/mission kill me before I can highwake even with accounting for them swinging Grom bombs. 'Course an engineered Challenger is safe as houses... and so is damn near every other ship in the game when built and reinforced, and to an extent no similarly equipped but unengineered ship could ever be, as the example about illustrates.
Even a stripped down Type 7 POS that spends a modicum of its internal and utility capacity on the tools to survive an interdiction is in only the tiniest danger of going pop in a 1-vs-1. Same for the Type 6. Same for basically every space truck in the game. However, against the AI you don't even need to do that as they're so bad, offensively speaking, and their interdictions so easy to escape, that you can fly around in what amounts to a bunch of cargo racks duct taped together with engines tied on with twine and not need to worry about popping because the threat isn't there. There was a time when setbacks for getting something like a 'Conda or Python shot out from under you were
devastating. Nowadays, the advent of easy cash making like Robigo tourism and Void Opal mining renders such setbacks quite a bit less terrible for many folks.
Aw hell, it's almost 2 AM and I've rambled enough. The point is, that yeah, the bots rarely have the tools a competent or experienced player will, and the gap between having those tools and not so vast you could hide Raxxla in there and no one would ever find it. The PvE is not built to follow the same expectations PvP does and vice versa.