Sure, but I remain curious if there's a "one weird trick"![]()
Before Odyssey what is now called Legacy /was/ the game & the free ARX long pre-dates Odyssey so someone may have done some research into it then but most exploits were ironed out fairly soon after it was introduced & at the time I was far more active in the game & would often have hit the ARX cap by the end of Thursday so wasn't paying much attention to which activities earned the most.
If you want to sit in outfitting cynically adding & removing modules to a ship or buying & selling limpets by all means have at it Cmdr.
To test how much ARX an activity earns you do the thing then log out to main menu, see how much the ARX count went up & log back in to do some more or something else. You have to be below the cap to see the numbers change of course.