Currently, developing contacts leads to increasingly lucrative missions, etc based on the contact importance. I feel contacts could serve a lot more uses, such as averting inspection fleets/expeditions from their own faction. The price of averting could be calculated based on the fleet size vs Contact rep/importance level/profession. This would put more incentive on developing certain contacts over others.
It might also make more sense to allow the player to communicate with the preferred contacts through the UI, at least if they are somewhere near a commsat. Having to visit the planet of the contact every time would become more and more tedious as the player interacts with them more.