What is the point of going out there? Not sarcastic question just curious what is there to draw folks to go there? Building stations or something?
In strict in-game terms, not a lot. There are very small advantages for miners and explorers from the short time it's been inhabited, mission generation is more stable than the bubble (so no 300MCr/hr gold rushes, but on the other hand reasonably good "do stuff and earn money" selections at most stations), and in 3.2 there's the (unique) feature of a facility that can be permanently upgraded by direct player effort (rather than indirectly by CGs)
In less strict terms ... the smaller size of the bubble means that you can learn where things are more easily (things like not being able to search in-game for outfitting or the 40 LY range on the map search really aren't big problems there) and of course now puts a full blueprint set of engineers right next to each other. Being right next to a large nebula and closer to the core means that the scenery is generally nicer. There's a much higher density of megaships and installations than in the bubble.
Being so far from the bubble makes local issues more important. If you're in some random edge-of-bubble system, your outfitting isn't very good, but in a fast ship it's ten minutes to hop to Shinrarta or a good LYR station and buy whatever you need. In Colonia, for most ships, you either need to use B/C-rated equipment [1] or make a substantial round trip (4 hours at record pace, 12 for less experienced and optimised players) to get A-rated. Similarly with engineering - you can now get G1 locally, but if you want higher you need to either have a pinned blueprint or make a trip (there are also tech brokers out here if you have unlocked stuff already). It's really the only inhabited place in the game where "resource constraints" are actually a thing. This is the key problem with fast travel there - it needs to be somewhat difficult to do [2], or it ends up no different to some random systems on the edge of the bubble. (Dockable megaships travelling at the same speed as the existing Colonia-bubble undockable megaships would I think be absolutely fine ... much faster than that I think would break it)
Finally, there is the disconnection from the main story. The development of Colonia is player-led and largely not affected by the main Aliens storyline. At the moment this is largely indirect - Frontier look at what people are asking for in Colonia and then try to implement it when they have a moment, but they've now given us upgradable engineers which will directly go towards the specialisations we choose ... and they have strongly hinted that more is planned eventually to give us more direct control over what happens. In the meantime, this is mostly relatively subtle, though.
[1] B/C-rated is not actually that far behind A-rated in performance for most modules, especially if you engineer it. Many of my ships are B/C-rated plus mostly G4 engineering and do absolutely fine.
[2] As I've said before, it's deeply unfortunate that the difficulty in making a 22,000 LY trip comes mainly from the risk of wearing out your 'J' key. It should be an actual challenge rather than merely an exercise in persistence. But the way to fix that has to be to make it challenging, not to make it even easier.
