I've wanted fleet officers to be "recycled" and appear again with reputation persistence, not for any behavioral effects (although those would be nice too) but simply because it'd be neat for the player to open the comm link and go "oh we've met before". Kind of a "make the Sector feel more alive/real" thing.
Yeah - The whole thing that gave me the impression that it'd be an eventual feature is that when say a fleet caught you with the transponder off, you'd lose reputation with its captain as well as their associated faction. I'm not sure if that's even still a thing in 0.8 though, but yes - at the bare minimum functionality it'd simply be an immersion thing. The next step up is if their disposition towards you, independent of that of their faction, changed gameplay in some way. If negative; Extorting you if you're significantly weaker, following you into hyperspace or the far reaches of their sector to try to kill you away from prying eyes, or if positive, jumping in a battle to help you against a faction theirs is neutral towards, escorting you through their sector if your fleet is weak, there are a lot of possibilities there. Then there's stuff like influencing the politics of a faction or alliance, playing them off against each other or going out of your way to help ensure the stability of a faction. All that said, the question is if such systems were created, would they be fully fledged, and would it be worth any effort if not? I think there'd be a lot of room for this sort of stuff within Starsector's gameplay, but I understand if it doesn't fit within the constraints of time/resources/development. We've already got honestly one of the best games I've played