I'm not sure ED was ever meant to have a player economy of any type at all - the moneys just there to give the impression of reality to some degree
The illusion was almost good enough early on, if you didn't look very closely, but it's frayed quite thin as the game has progressed, to the point that the stated vision of seeming like another reality comes off as completely farcical.
Commodities are so cheap you could buy hold full of palladium and jettison them in front of novice CMDRs and it would be a waste of time even trying to collect them...yet NPCs risk their lives for three tons of grain.
Faction representatives are continually trying to pay me two orders of magnitude more than the value of cargo to move it 300ly to a system that has a cheap supply one jump away, and they are happy to let me do it on my timetable.
I go into a resource extraction site in a dirt poor system with a population of 150 and am then confronted with a legion of NPC pirates tailored to my CMDR's pilots federation rank who then proceed to die by ring full, until I've killed five pirates and collected half a million cr for every man, woman, and child that's supposed to be in the system. Why are all these Elite pirates here trying to steal indite? How can this faction afford to pay me more than the next three generations of their decedents are likely to make over the course of their lives just to suppress pirate activity for a few hours?
A believable economy and demographics are critical to any setting. Those that are less free-form, that focus on other areas, can get away with more handwaving, but not
Elite. The quality of these aspects would be barely good enough for a Sonic the Hedgehog title, let alone a galaxy simulator that is supposed to keep thousands of people interested in trade for hundreds of hours.