I'm kind of late to the party, and usually I don't go to these kinds of parties anyway, but for some reason I feel compelled to contribute my perspective. Allow me to elaborate a bit (sorry, long rambling ahead).
I play in Solo. Almost exclusively. Between my Steam main and my free Epic alt I have something like 1700 hours or so, all done in VR. I like to play alone, because I don't fancy people in my "me time". I don't like people, and I hate gamers (no offense)

. I lurk around here a bit mostly for tech stuff (VR) and development and lore updates. I'm too old for the "Lulz", "git guds" and "haha spaceship go booms", so turning off the system chat was the first thing I did. It's disgusting, to be frank. So yes, I qualify for "care bear".
I only ever started playing ED because of VR; without it, I would never have touched it. I'm not in it for a challenge, or shiny pixels, or measuring contests with strangers on the internet. I'm in it, because in VR I'm sitting in a frikkin' SPACE SHIP. Flying around in space is... very relaxing, almost meditative. I enjoy building and rebuilding ships, and of course I also do like a bit of pew pew (I finally made triple Elite a few months ago), but I like the fact that I have control over it.
As I said, Elite is "me time". Life is stressful and challenging enough, I don't need that in my game time. I don't want competitive gameplay in my spare time. And if I fancy, I want to be able to fly my paper plane without some yahoo telling me to "git gud". So I play solo.
Yet I sometimes feel like missing out, so now and then I step out of solo, mostly in Mobius. In the past I have played a few bounty hunting CGs in Mobius and, if I remember correctly, twice winged up with a few nice CMDRs to clear out a HazRes or comprimised nav beacon, which was fun. I took part in Drew Wagar's last in-game story - well, "took part" is a strong word - I watched the stream and flew along. It was fun, and can I acknowledge that, sometimes, having likeminded people around isn't too bad. Some of the shenanigans the non-PVP-streamers and content creators do in a group look fun.
Having said all that, I made and experiment tonight. I hopped into something cheap (I'm having some fun engineering small ships at the moment) and decided to visit a few hot spots in open, fully expecting a few rebuys. My first stop was Jameson Memorial. First realization: Open is pretty empty. It's surely not helped by the fact I'm still playing Horizons, or maybe the action is at the CG right now, but I did meet at least a few hollow markers. Surprisingly noone tried to gank me. Some were sitting in Jameson, outfitting their ships, I presume. But no hostility. I flew around a bit, visited a few material traders and such, but I met - nobody.
Was I wrong? Let's raise the stakes, I thought, and made my way to Farseer in a Cobra. I didn't get pulled or ganked, but when I approached the engineer base I thought I was at a Pink Floyd show. A wing of wanted Anacondas was hovering above the base and delivering a shooting match, as it seemed, with everything that moved, shooting down at the landing pads. There were two or three other commanders, and I didn't bother to check if it was really ganking, seal clubbing or if they just had a bit of friendly jousting. I remembered that I didn't care for that and bolted. I visited a few of the less popular engineers as well as Sol, but again - pretty much nobody out there.
But the turmoil at Farseer? Yeah, I don't need that in my game. I don't want that. I don't want to be on my toes all the time as soon as I travel to a possible "hot spot". The few times I played in private groups it was kind of nice meeting someone; even if we only exchanged a short salute. I did another thing: I watched a few excerpts of streams and VODs of a few known gankers... and I thought: Boy, do I ever really NOT want to play with these tossers.
You can argue all you want that "it's just a game, don't get upset about pixels, it doesn't mean anything"... because it does. A game like ED is a time investment, and can also be an emotional investment. That's how people are, especially when their game time is limited by life in the real world. It's like when your toddler builds a sandcastle at the beach. It's unfortunate and inevitable when the sea washes it away, but it's much worse when the neighbour's ill-mannered brat stomps it down repeatedly, even if the result is the same (a destroyed sand castle).
So my TL;DR to my very long ramblings would be: I guess I would come out of Solo more often if I wouldn't have to worry about wannabe-space cowboys and man-childs spoiling my game. I think I would welcome either an Open PVE mode, or a PVP flag (that I can turn off and never touch again

). And no, Mobius isn't exactly that. It's limited and it's fractured across mutliple groups.
And yeah, I'm a care bear. I'm good with that.