Read though this monster thread... While it was an entertaining sh/tshow, I found myself agreeing more with your side, interestingly enough, even though I represent outlaw colors.
At the end of the day, SPEAR is truly a group of vigilantes, fighting outlaws for certain crimes they
occasionally commit against players. This inherently includes murdering of people that are, for example, peacefully robbing npcs, under CODE tags, or whatever, that's completely fine. When people join our fold, we tend to warn them, that they may face lawfuls that will attack them, simply because they rolled in our colors once, and it's documented/remembered. That's open. You're batmen, fighting fire with fire. Makes sense.
Open is also the place where outlaws are free to murder whoever they desire, which is also fine the way it is. When SPEAR jumps in to take care of these people, in my eyes it now makes sense that you use premium. Your goal is to stop "outlaw" activity, not particularly to have a fair fight. Therefore, any argument about it being unfair sounds really dull, especially from gankers.
But also, it's completely understandable how they do not want to take part in premium crafting, since that's an extremely poorly executed feature, linked to grinding. I understand them not wanting to fight you because of this, since they can't be sure if premium was used, only suspect it when it's already too late, and fighting every cmdr they run into with premium is an overly expensive playstyle.
EDR is truly powerful in this case, because lawfuls have a clear target ahead of them, who definitely needs to be eradicated. This info is not there for the outlaw, generating a scenario, where the lawful has a guaranteed premium advantage for a pre-planned confrontation. This, of course, is not a clear cut case of any ToS breaching, but the plugin synergizes with this broken premium feature wonderfully, giving a massive tactical advantage. That's a little fishy in my eyes, but like I described before, you have a goal ahead of you, I won't stop you from doing it more efficiently. I can't, that is. Sadly.
Let's hope some outlaw will one day make a tool that detects people using EDR, making us prepared for potential premium conflicts.
