I think consequences add a lot to games like this and am hesitant to support anything that degrades consequence even further. Increasing lack of consequence, both ability to suffer and inflict it, is a major reason for my reduced engagement with the game, because consequence is a major source of agency and a communal setting like this feels empty and senseless, to me, without that agency tug of war. A metaplot that is functionally on rails and increasingly erratic and marginalized BGS effects are a poor analog for more consequential interactions.
That said, the game doesn't treat data consistently and tying it to ships stopped making sense the moment they ended the pretense that FTL communication was some sort of scarce resource. I don't think random exploration data should be worth as much as it is, either in terms of credits or influence, but I do think it should be able to be sold from one's ship, remotely, at essentially any distance, to any arbitrary destination...unless they want to roll back the FTL comms stuff.
