Devs, fix all the small maddening bugs, don't rely on the issue tracker, play the actual game for a few weeks and experience first hand for yourselves.
Ramp up the difficulty in low sec and anarchy space. You want to transit these regions, you should be getting through on the skin of your teeth. Transiting these areas is like being hit by a wet lettuce leaf, there is no sense of danger. Low sec should have spec ops level opposition trying to ruin your day.
Pirate attacks should have systems crawling with ships ready to make your day sad. Terrorist attacks should have a sense of complete pandemonium at an "epicenter" of an attack, with missions themed as a result and follow up attacks as an event.
Mission threats should spawn actual threats that make player have a proper risk vs reward think. The fact I can take 18 source and return missions at lvl 8 difficulty in a row for nil enemies spawning (and of low quality and easily disposed of) is a joke.
Give PF's a sense of agency, collective resources (themed on their government and ethos types) with positive and negative attributes. Allow PF's to then use these collective resources for missions, for conquest support etc, whatever.
Allow NPC's to actually fly your own ships, even if its just one. Make those NPC pilots actual pilots for the price they demand.
Increase the ship counts in highs and medium CZ's. Highs espeically should be an absolute scrum. Have some CZ's spawn in rings.
Do atmospheric effects, nothing complex, simple cloud systems, different coloured lighting in denser atmospheres or atmospheres made of of different gasses, basic rain/snow effects coloured due to the atmossphere - doesnt have to be accurate to the nth degree. This opens up more worlds to land on. Oh and do basic water worlds, again doesn't have to particularly accurate but coupled with atmospheric effects could be quite nice.
And Gas giants, make them flyable but you could add a sliding gravity effect - fly up top and its pretty, but go lower the gravity increases but the denser gass reduces visual and sensor perofrmance - good for evading enemies and so on. But fly too low and get crushed.
Make weapon effects actually good again. Stop nerfing effects becuase players use it like you have in the past, give the player base experimental effects and engineered outcomes that offer us an actual dilema in choosing what to engineer.
Just a few things of the multitude of low hanging fruits on offer. Hell ignore the graphical stuff, just balance the game better and get better player agency.