If the system is actually getting raided and there are big enough pirate fleets, you can make some decent money from system bounties. 1400 per frigate may not sound like much, but that's also 2800 per destroyer, 5600 per cruiser, and 11200 per capital (assuming each size class simply scales the bounty by *2). If it's mid-late game and the pirates are active enough in the system or still had some raiding parties there, you can make a pretty easy 50k+ without having to spend the usual amount of fuel to leave the core systems for "personal" bounties.
I wouldn't call those 50k+ "easy", i would call them tedious. It's time consuming and isn't very fun, just like squishing an annoying mosquito that found it's way into your bedroom is just a pure annoyance.
A thing that bothers me is all those people saying "just build high command on every colony as early as possible".
That's just taking away one of my precious industry slots
There is no alternative besides tediously babysitting your colony 24/7
It strikingly contradicts the description of it, which talks about projecting power across the sector or something along those lines.
I think many problems could be solved if you had more control over your faction's fleet. Even something simple like adding a dialogue option to make your faction's fleet follow you, or making it possible to concentrate fleets from multiple systems in one place.
Also, it feels really illogical that core factions have resources to throw fleet after fleet at your system that's just a few LY away from the core, but can't be bothered to claim those ultrarich planets adjacent to the core for themselves. They can't deal with pirate bases that directly attack their worlds and disrupt production for the better part of a year, but continuously throwing resources at the player? Yes, please!
I see people claim that the sector is supposed to be falling apart, and maybe it's written in the lore, but from the game it surely doesn't feel like it. Planets don't change hands, factions start and end wars every few months and never suffer any consequences.
I'm not sure if my ramblings are making much sense, so here's the TLDR:
The player is the only moving part of the world and I can't help but feel like that's wrong.