In the real world, being totally neutral would only work if you didn't also engage in opportunistic trade. ... I suggest that this shouldn't be sustainable.
CITATION NEEDED. People arm both sides of a war all the time. Go watch Lord of War. It is, in fact, a major contributing factor in the cause of most wars -- the war would make everybody in a position to prevent it a lot of money selling guns & ammo to both sides, and preventing the war doesnt make anybody any money (except for the people who would die bc of it & nobody cares about them). In fact, engaging in black market trade with both sides of a war is literally how Switzerland made all of the wealth it has today, from helping nazis fence gold & heirlooms stolen off the people they genocided to the rich people inside allied nations to selling machine parts & parts critical for making the sights on bombers to both sides.
In fact, not only do neutral factions make bank selling to both sides, but the factions at war make bank selling
to their enemies. One of the major operations US special forces undergo in Afghanistan is aiding the Taliban in starting up mining facilities within the territory they control. This article acts like the role that the afghanistan president's brother plays in this operation is the big story, but focus on the role of the US in funding the Taliban
while waging war on them. A note that the article glances over without paying attention much to it is that when they say that this operation was run with the aide of a virginia based company "with ties to the US military", what they actually mean is that the people who started & run this fake company are a bunch of different people who work in the Secretary of Defense's office, which is a very polite way of saying that the right-hand man of the US President himself personally sold mining equipment to the taliban while at war with them -- this isn't just a "the men in the trenches sell smokes to the men on the other side of the field of fire", this is a "the men in charge sold your enemy the cannons they're using to shoot you, and the ammo too. And also they faked the evidence used to start the war".
https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/how-afghanistans-president-helped-his-brother-secure-lucrative-mining-deals-with-a-us-contractorIn fact, most of the money that funds half of the US's political parties comes from the personal bank accounts of a family that made its money using the US's infrastructure to sell oil refining equipment to the nazis during WW2.
EVERYBODY gets their hands dirty. If you wanted the game to portray conflict more realistically, what you actually should be advocating for is for conflict with a faction to no longer restrict you from accessing their black markets IF you are acting under the commission of, or rule, a major faction yourself. A realistic depiction of war would be, you going to war with the hegemony, defeating one of their fleets, performing every easy ship recovering of every enemy ship that you can, mothballing all of them immediately, then dragging the derelict fleet to the nearest hegemony market & selling the hegemony their ships back to them to fix up & field against you again.
Every war is & has always been like this & anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong or lying