Sandro, I think that your work on the KWS is mostly positive and in the right direction, but for me, as a bounty hunter (I actually rarely play anymore because bounty hunting is so awfull) the problem is largely one of actually tracking down a pirate target in the first place. Its the 'thrill of the chase' that ultimately make bounty hunting an exiting profession that people enjoy (potentially). But currently there are so little tools available to the BH player, that most of us just ended up hanging around CG's scanning ships coming and going, which was really rather dull and it just felt like seal clubbing. There was no pursuit involved, no trail of breadcrumbs to follow, and thus no 'thrill of the chase', that along with the fact that bounty rewards are tiny, just made it a really dull and unrewarding experience... When it could actually be so much more.
In the end under the current setup, I and others resorted to sending out friend invites to known pirates and using the friendship marker on the map as a kind of tracking device... But its not really a very good solution.
What I would suggest instead would be an in game database of highly notorious commanders, and the player should have the ability to select one or more players from this database as tagged targets, once tagged the 'bounty tracking module' would provide some information about their wearabouts, such as last reported crime scene, or last known station docked at as a trail to follow (but definately NOT give their exact current location). Both the database and the associated 'bounty tracking module' should require the player to become a registered member of the 'Bounty Hunters Guild', which in order to join should in itself require a small amount of effort akin to that required to join a faction or engage with an engineer.
I Can actually imagine a number of pirate players actively seeking to reach the top spot in the Galaxy's 'most notorious' list, but can you image just what a tough time they would then have dodging all of us bounty hunters that would be chasing the HUGE price that they would have on their heads... It would certainly make for some exiting gameplay.
Another level of engagement would be if missions could be generated randomly, Requesting for registered bounty hunters to go after certain highly notorious commanders and offering extra credits on top of the players bounty for a successful outcome.
At the end of the day, no matter how good you make KWS itself, it only really comes into play once you have tracked down a Pirate/criminal so in my opinion you need to get this bit right first.
