It's conceptually easy to fix really : replace easy and time consuming tasks by skill vs reward tasks.
Exactly.
Have you ever visited places like Pirates Cove, or some of the orbital shipyards and medical facilities?
They're massive facilities with multiple modules and internal passageways.
Would it really be so difficult to create some kind of mechanic whereby, once you're allied with an engineer, you can pin a blueprint and the engineer will send you tip-offs once in a while that provide the locations of "caches" of mat's that are required for your pinned blueprints?
You'd get a tip-off telling you, for example, that a group of pirates had captures a load of Biotech Conductors and were taking them back to their base.
If you were quick, you might be able to intercept them en-route, destroy the ships and snaffle the cargo.
Otherwise you'd have to fly to the Pirates Cove, fly
inside the facility and scoop the cargo from there, taking fire from the pirates
and the station as a result.
Alternatively, maybe the tip-off would tell you that a shipyard has taken delivery of Imperial Shielding or CD Composites.
Similar thing; Fly inside the facility and steal stuff.
Maybe surface bases could provide similar things too?
Tip-off tells you that a certain installation is experimenting with DWEs.
Go there, cause mayhem, escape with, say, 20 DWEs from every terminal you can scan.
Implementing something like that would create a reason for the engineers to actually
have rank again, would provide a purpose for a lot of currently under-utilized game assets and (most importantly) would create diverse gameplay and give people alternatives for locating mat's.
