A randomly chosen faction I've seen a few times. Present in 50 systems. Controlling 48 systems. Inara says over 200 players in squadrons and 100 out of squadrons support them. That's the ones that have made an Inara account. Many more will not have.
48/50 for control is pretty high percentage.
15 of the systems they control, they have less than 50% influence in. And they have a fair number of players. With the proposedmechanic change you put forward, that's 15 systems they can expand from with the new system. In addition to the 7 systems they can currently expand from by virtue of 75% influence, though iirc, that only chooses one. But that's still a situation whereby they can go from 1 expansion at a time to 16.
And wehere did I evern talk about like 15 expansions at a time? WHERE? they can as easilly today push their influence to 75% in all systems they already control... so what is the real difference?