Right now, doing nothing is a negative action once player has colonies, because the factions keep sending expeditions (especially with Free Ports on). Constantly mopping up pirates or turning in cores to fix reputation loss gets tiring (part of the babysitting problem), but if I ignore it, they will go hostile eventually. Sure, there is bribing, but it does not feel good paying tribute to extortionists, not to mention expeditions become too frequent to afford bribes (worth a million each) once the free ports are on.
That is my exact point. You shouldn't be able to raid a faction to death and then be able to easily fix relations.
There is an easy loophole - pirates! If I do nothing, they will decivilize some worlds after some years because core worlds have grossly inadequate defenses to repel pirate raids. (Anytime pirates raid a system, they almost always succeed unless I intervene.) At times, part of the punishment for expedition spamming I want to inflict on core worlds is withdrawing my protection from pirate raids. (In the end, I lose patience and sat bomb all of them out of their misery.)
If repairing relations is too hard or too annoying, I want to end it by killing them all (after I have sucked their blueprints and items dry), which my faction is more than capable of doing by endgame.
I guess my point was if relations are too hard to fix, why not keep doing more bad things like raid them more for their valuables before destroying them? If sat bombing is a real problem, starve them with raids (and player does not need to raid, just let the pirates do it).
Player faction is only an "upstart" by name by endgame, when it is more powerful than all of the core worlds.
I have read the expeditions will try to sat bomb your colonies after they successfully raid it previously twice. I have not allowed them to get that far, so I cannot confirm that.