Lets pretend all systems are nominal. Bugs are fixed. Combat logging is fixed. Instancing is improved all that stuff.
There are over 20k inhabitable systems in the bubble, meaning we have atleast 20k minor factions. According to EDDB, we have 76605 minor factions.
Since a minro factor nowe can be in multiple wars at the same time, we assumes we on average have 1 war per minor faction, so that is 76605 wars.
Each war spawns multiple conflict zones. So lets assume it on average is 3 (low, medium, high). This brings us to 76605 x3 = 229 815 conflict zones, lets round it down to 200k
Now the tricky issue is to estimate the number of players. as the only numbers we have available is the steam charts, and that is far from all the player. It is very likely that most players is playing without steam, so that would give that we have atleast double what the steam charts, says, and then we have the Xbox and PS4 players, so lets assume these are the same amount as Steam players as well, so we are now at around 3 times the number of steam players, lets add another round of players to bring it to atleast 4 times the steam players base.
Steam charts tells us that we have ~13k players playing at the same time, so that would give that we have ~13k*4= 52k players. on 3 different platforms. To make it easy, lets assume even spread, so divide by 3, so this give us ~17k players.
So how many of these 17k is actively playing BGS? Well we know that DW2 expedition attracted some 12k players (we assumes the dropouts from DW2 is covered by all those Explorers already out exploring), lets assume even spread here too and remove the console players, that leaves ~4k players on PC that is not actively doing BGS for quite some time now.
We are now down to 13k player (17k - 4k). And we know that not all of those players are engaged in BGS, but lets assume they are.
We will also assume all of these players are playing in Open.
So we have 13k players participating in 200k conflict zones, or ~0.07 players per conflict zone.
We have assumed that everyone is participating (well excluding the DW2/explorer crowd).
We have assumed that everyone that is left plays in Open
We have assumed that we have NO instancing problems or multiple instances in a system. (no blocking etc)
So I find it unlikely that we would encounter other players in conflict zones to begin with.
So lets collect ALL players (assume working crosplay), lets just count a war, not conflict zones, this brings us to 54k players (peak players) and 76605 wars, or on average 0.7 players per war.
We are still far from being likely to encounter another player, as we have already assumed everyone participates in BGS or the wars, we have also assumed working cross play, that everyone plays in open and that every war only has a SINGLE conflict one.
So there is going to be plenty of wars for people to farm in (your words on their activity) without risking encountering another player.
And that there are not many players participating in all the wars that rage across the servers is easy to sample, just travel to 10 random system in wars, and read the news. it will tell you how many days a current faction have been winning. Quite often both sides have a 0 here. meaning no side is actively supported by a player.
So the entire foundation of your suggestion is not supported by the numbers. There are simply not enough players participating in the wars.