Overbalancing seems to be a rather common issue here, I think first of all if, measures are taken to make every little aspect marginally profitable, then an easy mode should have modified values in every economic and logistical aspect. Otherwise you risk losing a considerable amount of new players who will slam their faces against many economic viability walls, just because the game ends up being balanced towards the playstyle of both people who are particularly good at this sort of game, and that of what can only be called experts who have played it for about a decade through all of its versions already.
There are several design philosophy decisions to make about this sort of thing, one is whether you make the player feel immersed and a part of the world, following the same rules as everyone else, or a different force who has forces stacked against them.
Example being either: 1)Immersive: legal trading is profitable between producing colonies and consuming colonies otherwise the universe makes no economic sense, but not if you drag a heavy cruiser escort in tow for example, you are a trader not a mercenary.
2)Circumstantial: legal trading is ONLY profitable when dealing with considerable surplus and scarcity in order to make the price difference worth it. This already would make normal trade a loss (slight ludonarrative dissonance) but would try and lead the player to more opportunistic and sporadic trading, you are not a trader, you make a living with something else but jump at an opportunity when its there.
3)Challenging: legal trading is NEVER profitable and so the player exists in a completely different state than the rest of the in-universe actors, you are forced to act illegally in order to make a profit from commerce. Considerably more heavy handed approach, this sort of system destroys all suspension of disbelief and makes the player identify it as a clear design choice, far more likely to cause frustration through the schism that appears between what is said (how everything is supposed to work) vs what is shown (how everything actually works).
As such the act of balancing is not only between simple numerical factors among themselves, it also involves the vision of what the experience and contact of a player with the world ought to be. How much immersion wants to be achieved, how conscious the player should be about the mechanics they interact with (in a bad trade you could expect to be screwed by the mechanics through developer choice or you could expect to be screwed by the pirates through in game factors). Sense of the game vs sense of the world.
Punishing environments with unclear rules are good for people who are seeking exactly that, but if the game seeks to be attractive to more than that minority, then either different modes must be developed extensively, or challenge must be provided in more specific aspects of the game, with proper explanation of what the player can expect.
Personally I've never found anything I couldn't deal with, but then again I'm someone who powergames even "relaxing" farm sims. You can't take me or number crunching meta gamers as the base difficulty without serious market risks.
Tl dr: subpar strategies and playstyles should remain viable both for immersion and noob friendliness, while challenges for metagamers should be provided through other means. Most importantly boring mechanics ought to be safe while fun mechanics ought to be risky, the difference in fun between an hour of glorified delivery service and 10 minutes of badass space bounty hunting is evident to all i believe, let the poor kids who still can't fight get a decent money cushion to fund their future strategic and logistical disasters.