I'm not against shooting. It's just that this is "the way" most things are achieved as it is. By prioritising it as the most efficient, then all you do is make it defacto.
This, then, is no different to spamming donation missions. Or anything else. It's not solving anything, just shifting which is the most effective, and thus what CMDRs do to grind rank. To make bonds gain naval rank, you have to introduce missions that require bonds to gain rank. The problem with this approach is that slaughtering many pirates, for example, creates negative influence. So now you gain for one faction, but destroy influence with another. If the same is true for CZ combat, then once again you are gaining influence with one group, only to lose it with another.
So adding more mission types that are combat, over the existing? it's quite doable as clearly more types have been added - but it's still just shifting the deck chairs around - and causes distortion of influence that will create negative gearing against one or more factions you are actually trying to curry favour with. If you are hostile with a faction, they will offer missions you cannot accept as you're not aligned (indeed are likely to be classed as hostile).
So before you claim my response is one-dimensional, perhaps understanding what this will do to faction influence, might be in order (hint: this will not be as productive as you believe).
The issue of slow rank progression has very little association with how it's gained, but what the influence amount is and how that translates to rank progression. It's once again been nerfed via additional missions being added (bumping donation and combat missions) and stations where factions were in massive decline (and thus spewing donation missions) -- which haven't appeared to actually influence the BGS -- either now do, or Frontier went and artificially pushed them back out of bust type states.
Ranking is now painful again; it swings back and forth as Frontier make a combination of determined, and arbitrary changes. This is partly because declining systems (that were effectively endlessly stuck in this state) appear to have been 'fixed' and because Frontier have apparently decided it should really suck making rank for cutter and corvette, despite a fair whack of the player base already having the rank required.
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The progress bar has been fixed; RNG is still in play, so the progress bar does not track in a linear fashion, it instead reports percentage of rank gained, thus will almost certainly not move much if 'low' influence missions are selected, and will move sporadically if 'medium' or 'high' influence missions are completed. It took me a good two weeks of fairly solid numbers of hours, to make Marquis and then Duke. The days of knocking over a rank level in about a day of spamming missions, are long gone.
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