That's an explanation of events which implies a different order of how they happened - Frontier had set the Sol, Achenar, Alioth and Shinrarta systems to be locked against BGS activity long before you got close to Sol. If it had been possible to expand to Sol, nearer factions would have filled it up to 7 long before you got close. I'm not quite sure how you managed to aim for the system for 2.5 years - an incredibly impressive journey showing great BGS skill - and not notice at any point during that time there was something odd about it.
Firstly Re: locking capitols. Alioth yes, but Gateway
is the home system of a PMF.
Secondly Re:Sol
It started out as a joke - "Let's get an Alliance faction into Sol" and stayed that way for a long time, but there was a constant push south.
When it became viable we did a push through four or five expansion including the Ross 128 liberation that ultimately became as close as we could get.
We didn't have our eyes closed about the PowerPlay capitol systems being locked out of inbound PMF expansion.
Hutton Truckers and EDF and uh - one other had expansions that should have gone in long before we got there. We knew.
But the caveat was that the faction we were pushing was not officially acknowledged as a PMF. We had asked - but Frontier said "Only one official in-game faction per group". So we were effectively pushing an NPC faction.
And there HAD been one NPC faction expansion into Sol.
That was back in the days of that mechanic that they modified into "invasion". If your expansion would go into a full system and the lowest faction was below 2.5% then you would go in, but that <2.5% faction would get sucked out into the system from whence the invasion happened. One of the early Sol expansions triggered that mechanic and an external faction was sucked in. I believe it got kicked out by the retreat mechanism eventually.
It was a weird mechanic, but we used it a bunch of times.
Anyways it was worth a shot. And we did get to kick in the doors of that awful Fed Prison System Ross 128!
But even there Frontier would not let player agency "force" them to make meaningful lore change.
The questions I ask in this video are relevant to this debate now.
Which is:
Should Frontier allow real Player Agency?
Should change wrought on the BGS be able to affect lore?
Should we be able to take the game in fresh directions without Frontier spoon feeding us?