I would absolutely love to see persistent npc's, with independence and personalities of their own. Their interaction (and our own) would automatically generate missions. For example, if a pirate faction decides that a certain trade company seems ripe for juicy pickings, they may target that target and harass and pirate them till they run out of goods to pirate. The trade company would then put up a BB notice of bounties paid on pirates, or hire escorts for their trade ships. The pirates might then get at you at put out their own bounty on your head to dissuade others opportunistic enough to try and impede their business. Of course, we would need some pretty darned good AI programmers for this because the NPC's have to have such depth that they don't appear repetitive or predictive, and can rival cmdrs in their own actions.
With the above suggestion, NPC interaction is a must. We need to be able to communicate/respond to NPC both in space and in stations. We don't yet need space legs for this. We should be able to move around the station and see graphical representations of said area, and a map of npc's and their locations, and have the ability to communicate with them. The NPC's should have the ability to give missions, snitch on you (I hate this guy), generally chit chat, tell space stories of a planet they once visited that has buried treasure, etc... This would give us a semi-ability to leave our ship without space legs and give us an approximated sense of roaming around the station, and a feel of being included n the ED world.
There aren't enough bodies in the systems. In our own solar systems there are millions of bodies, but in ED there only exists a max of a little only over 100 bodies? Yeah, something's not right there. And in that same vein, what happened to the orrery?
We need cockpit customization. Yes, yes, I know FD wanted to make the HUD as clutter free as possible, but are you sure that's what we want? Give us the choice to make our hud/panels as clutter free or cluttered up as we like it. Give us customization.
The separate screens for the system map and the galaxy map have to go. They need to be holographic representations in the cockpit. In fact, everything should happen in the cockpit because that's the point of view. Opening a new screen to display other information is so 80's. This is not V1 of Elite.
3D doesn't look 3D enough. I play in VR, and while flying high, I don't get the sense that I'm high up. And when close to the ground, I don't get the sense that I'm too close. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it has to do with focus. When looking far, near things should be out of focus, and when looking close far things should be out of focus. How do we accomplish this? I almost have no idea. Perhaps eye tracking would help. But there is more to the name not looking 3D enough than focus and blur, but I can't quite put my finger on it...
We that's my 2c so far.