Basically, I don't have enough time to play games. I am aware that online games, not only am I paying for product, I AM the product.
Well here's the thing. I don't WANT to be the product. So, Solo Play is the price I pay to NOT be the product. I don't get to be "enriched" into tiny pieces of hull-dust by players with 5 years of Advancements and assets and skills nor do I get to make any new friends. That's fine, I don't have time for them.
Would I play in Open if PvP was off? Maybe. I would try, but the moment I realise I am just product again, probably to some Twitch streamer who needs my affirmation for his viewers, I'd be offline again. I am NOT your product or revenue stream. I owe you nothing. I'll pay Braben because he did me a solid when I was 12 with Elite. But the rest of it you can more or less keep. I am not YOURS.
If FDev made this decision to keep us loners out of everybody's way, I accept it. It is the Elite experience I had as a kid. No friends. No life. I'm ok with it.
IF there was full looting, that would be another matter. I'm from Eve:Online and there I was a terrorist to carebears, because it lead to profit and gains. Stealing weeks of grind off people was WORTH it. Here, as I've come to learn it, it's just interrupting somebody and getting nearly nothing out of it. That doesn't appeal to me. I don't get anything out of it.
I'd go back to Eve if CCP could bring themselves to apologise for... well... it doesn't matter. They didn't and they won't.