This has been improving somewhat over the last few years - until about 18 months ago there was barely any content in Galnet at all, and the amount of player interaction with it has slowly been increasing since. The Interstellar Initiative - next stage starting tomorrow - is probably about as far as it's practical to go, but gives players rather more involvement in stories from Galnet than they've had in the past, while also being a bit more interesting in terms of content and outcome than the old Community Goals were.
There are I think five broad difficulties with letting players really influence Galnet stories.
1) The Mystery Problem. As Redden Alt-Mer points out, there are two types of mystery in Elite Dangerous: ones which someone will solve or get lucky on within about three hours of its release because there are a lot of players looking ... and ones like Raxxla or The Dark Wheel or the old Formidine Rift mystery where the available clues narrow the search zone down to maybe a few million systems if you're lucky, so they remain unsolved because they are basically unsolvable with the information given. So plots which rely on a player discovering the answer are very tricky to set up if you need the discovery time to be slower than instant but quicker than never.
In the case of this DBX, it's been gone for two weeks, so could literally be almost anywhere in the galaxy by now. Setting up clues so that it gets discovered soon enough that they can move on to the next step of the plot before everyone's forgotten about it entirely ... but not so soon that it gets in the way of other plots is very tricky.
Jaques Station, which similarly went missing on a "well, it could be anywhere by now" trajectory, was found several weeks before Frontier expected it to be - and before they'd got the next bit of the story ready! - because on that occasion they accidentally gave an extra clue they didn't mean to, allowing someone to stumble across it much quicker than finding the actual clues would have been.
2) The Numbers problem. One way to avoid the Mystery Problem is to make figuring out what to do a very minor part, and doing it the big bit which requires far more effort than a single player or even a single player group could possibly achieve.
The problem there is that there are a few million copies of the game sold, and probably around a few hundred thousand players who are at least semi-active. So calibrating the size of the goal is really tricky.
A typical trade Community Goal takes a week and involved a few million tonnes of cargo. Repairing a damaged station takes about half a million tonnes of cargo - so you might expect about five stations to be repaired a week ... actually, it generally takes a few weeks per station, because considerably fewer players do station repair compared with trade CGs.
Conversely the first Distant Worlds mining CG had participation several times greater than any previous mining CG had ever had, and ended up 12 times more successful than its original target.
On some of these things, Frontier have been out on their original estimates of participation by over 100 times - but that's understandable, when a bit of luck or a charismatic player really pushing participation can make the difference between ten people showing up and ten thousand showing up.
Again, though, it makes setting up plots based on players completing a particular task in a particular estimated timescale very tricky for them.
3) The Olav Redcourt problem. The more agency you give players in determining where the story goes, the less chance that the plot will make any sense to anyone not personally involved. Stories generally benefit from a structure with a defined set of events - Frontier have occasionally incorporated unexpected player actions into their stories, but generally only when it didn't change things too much.
This is a particular problem when it comes to incorporating BGS or Powerplay events into stories - it's quite possible for a system to change hands four times in the BGS and twice in Powerplay over the course of a story arc lasting a month. Most stories won't be helped by setting them against the backdrop of multiple revolutions.
But this all means that interaction generally has to be in fairly constrained ways with predictable outcomes, and inconvenient details like the Alliance losing control of a major plot-relevant system have to be temporarily ignored.
4) The Ego problem. There are a lot of players who want to push the story in their preferred direction, and some of them have big enough egos that they view the very existence of players trying to push the story in a different direction as illegitimate. On previous occasions where player actions have been allowed to substantially influence outcomes there have been some extremely vocal sore losers, conspiracies that Frontier was secretly supporting the other side all along, occasionally retrospective inventions of sides so that they could lose, etc.
This shouldn't stop Frontier allowing player involvement - but it means that they know if they allow players to influence any really important outcomes there'll be a lot of cleanup to do on the forums afterwards, so they're probably going to keep it rare enough that they can take a break between explosions.
5) The Capability problem. It's a computer game, with a particular feature set. Often the way that players want to be able to influence a story would require very substantial development work first - maybe capabilities that Elite Dangerous won't have for years - or a huge amount of manual work to "fake" it.
You can see this one with the current Interstellar Initiative - it's a big step forward on previous Galnet, Community Goals and player involvement - but the main complaints are "that's all?". It's never going to be possible to make things as interactive as players want them to be.
Colonia's development is another example - Frontier have gone out of their way to make it player-driven throughout - but with a few exceptions this has had to be done by Frontier listening to player requests, trying to pick out overall themes, and then taking things in that direction. The sort of direct player involvement where Frontier don't need to manually do anything
- would be great
- would probably be easier for Frontier as well
- is probably several years off in terms of development roadmap
...but people would also have been unhappy if the development of Colonia had been put on hold for a decade while Frontier built up the necessary capabilities.
I guess it was always a long shot but thought it was worth maybe shouting about. Sounds like there's a lot of technical hurdles to overcome.