Why I can never quite get into Elite...

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

You could do worse than trying organised powerplay in an open-only group. If you're doing powerplay or related BGS activity in a location where your opponents don't want you to succeed, then there's a challenge of completing your activity under constant risk of fire. And that can be a spectrum of danger. Hauling in a T9 without escort with little chance of escape if attacked. Doing PvE combat with dedicated PvP ships trying to chase you out. But you get a lot of in-between too - PvE ships vs. other PvE ships, small wing of PvPers vs. 4-wing of PvEers, off-meta PvP ships just dropping on PvEers to stop their activity and lure them into fights, mixes of engineering levels and experience, PvEing/hauling with friendly PvPers covering. So it ends up being very organic and varied. It ebbs and flows (with a waning phase at the moment sadly). But there's always a likelihood of it picking up when a long term strategy reaches a crux.

On the other hand, PvE becomes something different too. If NPC ships are weak, or you can haul safely, that doesn't mean you've won. Your opponents are also potentially faced with weak ships or easy hauling, so the challenge becomes speedrunning a given activity, with gameplay around efficiency and maxing out co-op leveraging.

 

[Cageman]

As others have mentioned, the challenge is what you set it to be. I have well over 10k hours in this game and yesterday I almost got killed when doing a cargo transport mission because I made two misstakes.

1) The ship/shield was not equipped to sustain any NPC fireing for a prolonged time at all. I need to rebuild this ship now.
2) I committed to an interdiction instead of fighting it. This lead to my paperthin shields to go down before the FSD had rebooted (around 10 seconds) and with no extra hull protection etc, my ship was down to 48% hull when the FSD engaged the next jump. 10 more seconds and I would have been dead.