I've always found the PvP vs. PvE dichotomy to be silly and artificial, created by irrational player psychology and reinforced by questionable game mechanisms.
The gap between the weakest and strongest ship is too big to allow open PvP to be anything other than lop sided.
Everyone with Horizons has equality of opportunity in this regard, which is the most anyone can rationally expect from an open world game.
People shouldn't be punished because they don't want to go to Dav's Hope and log off/on 100 times. You are no longer playing a game at that point or having fun.
Indeed there are issues with how the game encourages materials to be collected, but things have never been better than they are now.
Personally, my CMDR (who has more than 5k G5 rolls, many of them made during the vastly more tedious pre-3.0 system) has been to Dav's Hope twice, ever, and has never relogged, mode switched, board flipped, or abused any other mechanism to facilitate material gathering.
Anyway, Engineering is just a scapegoat at this point. The time required to fully unlock all Engineers, gather materials without any exploitation of busted mechanisms, and construct several fully Engineered vessels is
far lower than the time required to gather sufficient tactical and piloting experience to be competitive with veteran PvPers.
Every CMDR is part of that 'E'.
The “problem” with game balance is player skill. No dev in the world can hope to overcome it.
Yes, and I'll use CQC as an example of imbalance in this regard.
Below are some screen shots I dug out of the first days of CQC, when everyone was playing because it was novel. During the beta I went plenty of matches with double digit kills and no deaths, in an eight person free for all, and I carried my team in almost every TDM match. This is why I quickly gravitated to CTF, because raw combat ability was less of a deciding factor.
The odds of having another skilled pilot being placed in the same match as me at the time was quite low, simply due to population factors (most players don't know anything), and this is what happens when everything is "balanced":
I think I finished the 1.4 beta with a CQC KDR of almost ten-to-one, because in September 2015 I had ~1500 hours of PvP experience in the Viper, Vulture, and FDL and ~95% of the players I was pitted against had nothing.
The only reason CQC appeared even vaguely balanced later (at least when in cheat free match) was because those who didn't enjoy it quickly abandoned it and everyone who was left quickly became proficient at it. The main game doesn't work much differently, and no amount of balancing the tools is going to make those players currently disinclined to experience combat any good at it.