To add one more perspective here. I just prefer playing in Mobius. Mind you, when the game was young I did some stuff in open, later I sometimes by accident ended up there. (E.g. when you had to leave the game session and start again. Some steps of engineers as well as community goals often required you to do that to update something. )
Several times I was attacked in such situations, but the only ship I ever lost was my Imperial Courier. And in those situations I also could have run. Only due to my ship being so cheap, i decided to take on the fight despite being in a small ship and outnumbered. Next to loosing the Courier a few times, I could tell stories like of the guy who tried to take down my cargo Python over an engineers outpost and ran away or of the three guys who took my Krait down to 72% hull when leaving from a station where the community goal ended three days ago and who apparently just were hoping to gank unaware late leavers.(Would they have been any good shots, they could have taken me down before i was outside of the stations mass lock. But hey, if they would be any good, why would they gank? )
A certain part of the forums would have made huge stories out of that, would praise these things to the heavens on how much fun they had there and things like that. For me, these events were all "meh". People whose ability to communicate start and end on the fire button just bore me. We have NPCs which do better than them.
Would open be the only way of playing the game, I'd be long gone. Not due to it being too challenging. (As mentioned, the only ships i ever lost to players were in situations where i knew the risk, would have had the choice to escape but due to my ship being so cheap i decided to rather fight. ) But due to this part of the community being way too boring for me.
So short of FD implementing some kind of "PvP toggle" or anything like that, Mobius for me is the way to go. Unfortunately meeting people there by now is quite rare. But when it was still active i met people there who actually knew how to communicate. They did not behave like dumbed down versions of NPCs, and understood other means of communication than the fire button.
Thus in contrast to all the "but gankers make the game more interesting" statements, I actually dare to say that they make the game more boring. Interesting people would actually make the game more interesting, the normal ganker goes in the very opposite direction. I just shrug and move on, there's simply nothing interesting they ever manage to contribute to the game.
Edit: As a sidenote I like to add that gankers are just a very small subset of PvP players, basically the lowest form of them. Before engineers were introduced, I actually did participate in PvP and interesting people were to be found there. I believe that the same is still true, only engineers and the grind resulted in my falling too far behind and I rather moved out than to rush into the grind. So really, there are interesting PvP people, be it in organized fights, BGS activities or perhaps even PP. Although I am not sure on the last part, considering the state of PP. But the "now I gank random people" player, while he actually might really need some help and might have some interesting problems, is the most boring encounter possible in the game.