In the Great Galactic Census there isn't an important parameter to be counted: the spaceports and the settlements controlled by the PMF.
Thank you for your kind pointer. We have given much consideration to include other assets of (controlled by) factions, stations and settlements primarily. Two factors contributed to not including them as focus areas for this census.
The first one was that the census focused on population and population is linked to systems. (Stations have a hidden population-like attribute that is a factor in determining the controlling station in a system. We found no way to quantify it so far or even to properly rank it as the distance to entry star and potentially other factors sometime override even the station size category when determining controlling station or priority asset in asset transfer following conflicts. For this reason Coriolis stations frequently rule over Orbises just to give an example.)
The second was a technical issue. Some settlements are not featured in commanders log the same way as stations or larger settlements. Those are settlements without a landing pad. These settlements are transferred at the resolution of a conflict just like any other station or settlement, yet they don't provide statistics at landing as there is no landing at them. They only generate an approach settlement log message in commanders log, and even such a message might come bundled with half a dozen approach settlement messages if those are close to each other. When we planned the census we tried to figure out how to circumvent this limitation with our (not eddb based) client-server infrastructure we planned to provide for the census as an alternative sampling method. We found no reasonable solution and it made us to gravitate towards dropping stations/settlements for now at least. (Ultimately we dropped the idea of a modified proprietary census client because the potential support nightmare due to its' reliance on visual c++ runtimes among other factors for a single use per faction representative and decided to integrate the census engine with the eddb ecosystem already used widely.)
That said, and even with the community focus of the census I absolutely agree that stations and settlements are a good indicator of efforts and achievements of factions. This way those are also a display of the progress of the community. Conflicts for assets occupy the state pipeline and taking over assets without conflicts often require more efforts from factions. For this reason I'll put together a complementary engine for enumeration of stations based on available data in the eddb. We will think about how to display it in the framework of the census.
