Perhaps I've been playing PvP games long enough to not have a problem accepting I'm at best average. A decade of PvP has made the hierarchy clear to me in every multiplayer game ever. Unreal Tournament, Gears of War, Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, League of Legends, CS:Go, so on and so on. NPCs can fill a gap to a degree, but are really nothing more than dumb cattle to be farmed. Figure out how to exploit their programming flaws and ez credits. Mostly because the community demanded SJA's smart NPCs to be nerfed because "NPCs now too hard; can't farm in 30 seconds anymore pls nerf." So we get half lobotomized NPCs that pick fights in underequipped ships, rarely try to run to save themselves, and die with great speed. Good for farming money; bad for learning what you're doing wrong and correcting those things.
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In general I agree with this statement, though honestly I don't think it has anything to do with NPC's actually being hard, but more the gaming culture of late, people are because of how sooo many games provide instant gratification, that they complain when things aren't instant, and yes I entirely agree this happens a lot in many games and has generally ruined many good games, however I want to point out the main nerfs in Elite npc's didn't really work in that degree.
NPC running to regain shield - just drawed the fights out, since especially if you were in a slower ship they could do it near endlessly, and skill generally can't compensate against running away with how our weapon loadout works now, unless you could very quickly disable thrusters, which given how fast they ran, was impractical.
NPC's having engineer weapons - while yes this significantly made them more difficult, an NPC has several things a player does not, infinite amount of certain things amongst others, add that they could come against people who hadn't even had a chance to get engineering going, and those players could be significantly outpowered often, would limit their progression ability, overall it just wasn't helpful to the game, for players that already had engineering stuff it felt more challenging, for those that hadn't? it felt just painful and spawning was too eager with it, I do believe frontier has indicated it will return once they get it 'right'.
NPC accuracy with rail guns - It doesn't seem 'fixed' despite what patch said, but lets face it, super accurate npc's that never miss is just not fun, take GTA V as example, getting sniped by police while driving fast, because they have 100% accuracy, can be seen as a challenge, sure, but it quickly becomes eye rollingly predictable if you ask me, and disruptive to the game as a whole.
To me NPC difficulty is a balancing act.
Too easy: no fun boring you get everything easy, but some people want that.
Too hard, 100% accuracy basically computer knowing stuff because it reads your input, and isn't reacting to your actual actions from its perspective: also becomes boring, npc's that for example know exactly what you are doing because they read your input just becomes boring, predictable and at least to me isn't seen as a challenge.
The 'right'/perfect npc: would in my book be an NPC that worked with similar limitations as a player, ammo, movement causing aim to lose accuracy, basically they would be affected by everything a player is affected by, and they would according to their own skill level, react within x time, but never perfectly, they would have a reaction time, that would at best be better then humanly possible but not perfect. And they would react not from player input by from what they out of their own senses saw the player doing.
