FD is breaking down the walls. Thargoid hunting used to be the exclusive preserve of a few dedicated groups since everybody else avoided it - the Jameson CG (as you said) is changing that.
To an extent. It's certainly getting more people to give it a go, but not to that sort of extent, because AX was
already a much more mass-participation thing than you might think. I wouldn't expect it to be reflected in a further long-term rise in participation unless Frontier keep launching AX attacks on systems people care about (which they might)
3 trillion bonds (so far) would probably be around 150,000 interceptor kills [1] of various types plus a bunch of cheaper scouts and hunters. Double that by the end of the week, say. That's a lot, but not significantly more than recorded by third-party tools for the first weeks of the invasion back in 2022.
Looked at another way 6 trillion bonds a week is about three times as fast as a busy week on the squadron leaderboard totals [2] - though of course, not everyone is in a squadron, so that's a bit of an overestimate. The ratios between individual squadron scores on AX are basically the same as for the other leaderboards too - you could equally say that "trade" or "exploration" were dominated by a few dedicated groups.
Looked at another way, total CG participation is high at a bit over 6,600 and still rising, which beats the recent record for an AX CG of 4,656 back in pre-war 2022 (and is likely to end up as the most participated CG since the Colonia Bridge) - but again it's hardly the difference between "a few dedicated groups" and "mass participation" (on the scale of people playing ED, essentially all CGs are "a few dedicated players")
[1] Which because of the cloning of the bonds to all contributors means fewer actual dead interceptors, of course.
[2] The introduction of the war was I think a bigger effect on Thargoid hunting - squadron leaderboard activity rose by 5-10x, and the count of participating squadrons tripled - and it's stayed sustained at those sort of levels since, which is the more impressive bit. Around a quarter to a third of all active squadrons participate in AX to some extent nowadays, which is a long way from it just being a few dedicated groups.
Curiously, PP is in the same boat so PP 2.0 will probably break that exclusivity wall too.
Yes, though PP's exclusivity is for very different reasons. The Powerplay activities are individually very easy - if not very interesting - and so long as you either don't care whether your actions benefit your power or don't realise that "the things the game says help" and "things which actually help" are almost completely different, then you don't need to join the one unified command trying to herd people onto the latter. It's not that it's "exclusive" in that sense, it's just not very interesting compared with activities Frontier have brought in more recently.
PP2 certainly
should improve participation levels especially in the short term though it'll be hard to tell how much because it's so difficult to compare.
And before today, I would have said there was no way in hell Thargoids & PP activity would mix but now I'm not so sure.
Frontier certainly don't intend for players to defeat the final Titan before PP2 releases and I'm starting to suspect they don't want Raijin defeated before/until then either - I expect we'll see a lot more Shinrarta-style attacks on "systems anyone actually cares about" to continue slowing the main war down if they turn out to need even more time for PP2.
on the other hand I'm quite sure it lowers actual motivation and actual participation numbers
I assume by "participation numbers" you mean the total score for the CG as a whole rather than "number of participants".
I don't think it really matters much for that - the top 25% in this CG are putting in at least 75% of the total bonds (which is normal); the bottom 25% at any CG generally contribute less than 1% of the total anyway so there's really not going to be much difference in the total if they slack off a bit (and potentially compensated for by more people showing up to shoot one scout)
Rewards at higher thresholds certainly do often push the relative position of that threshold higher, and desirable rewards of any sort often push participant count and activity higher overall, but it rarely seems to make much difference to the 75% or 100% lines.
