As another AoC player, I agree with your statement about what happened in AoC, I disagree with it applying to Elite. AoC is a single world where everyone interacts with everyone else, so you can actually DO what happened in AoC. Elite isn't built that way, you can't actually blockade ANYTHING, instancing alone precludes it from being possible in Open without adding in the Group/Solo work arounds. I remember those days in AoC, I remember logging on, seeing none of my guild on and going 'oh boy, this is probably going to hurt'. But again, one world, and you couldn't just ignore the blockades because the game put you in an instance where they weren't. I didn't see a single sign of CODE doing my runs to Hutton, instancing kept me perfectly safe, and I wasn't running naked, I was prepared to be interdicted and all that, it just never happened. I wasn't alone either, most of the people doing the run never saw them, 20 of them means only a few instances they would be, compared to the hundreds running to Hutton at the same time.
Emergent gameplay requires us to all be in the same world, we don't have that in Elite, so it's not something that will happen via the methods CODE used, it's impossible. We had convoys and wings going BEFORE any of the pirates showed up, days before that, all coordinated via the Hutton Orbital Radio station, TS, FB page and via the Elite forums themselves. CODE and SDC contributed NOTHING to that, not a single thing, they simply showed us all the problems with the BGS and how it reacts to the player's actions, and how groups like them are exploiting the game mechanics to bypass the systems in place to keep them from doing what they did.