The behavior of the players is just natural logical behavior, if the game was designed differently, the behavior would be different. Its Frontier at fault for not understanding how humans think, not the fault of humans for being what they are. Is not like the players of Elite are some obscure breed of aliens that behave in mysterious ways.
Its all a matter of a balance between work vs reward.
Its a rule of nature that the path of least resistance will be taken, specially when the reward is a long term one that requires hundreds or thousands of hours.
If a method to reach it is 10 times slower, people are not gonna bother with it, specially when its also harder.
If the work required is too high, and the reward is too low, people are just not gonna bother with it, and find that some other game could offer them much more satisfaction instead.
And yes, the rewards are bigger ships and higher stats for those ships, because this game has nothing else to strive for. The player actions don't really matter and act of killing procedurally generated enemies in itself is not enough engagement to justify playing the game. If its you trying to tell people to approach the game with a different mentality, instead of the game naturally evoking that mentality out of them, then its the game at fault. A game should not be judged based on what it could be, but by what it is.
Let me put an example of what could be rewarding gameplay or a reason to play for the sake of playing that is not just earning credits, instead of what we have now:
Lets say you want to rank up in the Empire, right now, you have to do 200 random missions, and then a short mission to advance in the navy. That is just grinding, nobody thinks they are doing anything meaningful there, because its a computer generating content, so it feels less real.
Now, Imagine if to advance in the navy, you take a VERY long mission with 50 steps along the way, with a carefully crafted story, that links you as the player to the world itself. You get to know characters, get to like them, get to hate them, get emotionally invested in it, you get unique gear out of it, and swag to decorate your ship, both externally and internally, to remind you of what you did.
Right now, do you feel anything when you destroy a random NPC? or when a random system security dies? Do you remember their names? Do you go to sleep thinking about those characters? No. You go to sleep thinking how awesome your ship will be, and how awesome this game could be, but nothing else.
