@Midnight Kitsune: Without going blog-length about this, I will just say that all of that's solvable.
A bit of rebal on how profitable piracy is, XP rewards for Events (which, like I've said before, are just a few breaths away from actual Missions, in terms of gamecode structure), etc., can give players two different paths to take that are both worth doing.
There's nothing wrong with XP for Events; you've just delivered the life-saving drugs to a world on the brink of extinction while heroically dodging pirates and all that, with the possibility of a Gotcha battle as you deliver the goods to keep things interesting. If Events are handled well, then you're going to deserve some XP, because it was risky, involved making real choices and took enough time to be like a side-quest.
The way I imagine it, combat / piracy will gain more XP but less money than Events and vice versa. So if you're grinding credits, you're doing all the Events you can (and, if you are up for it, doing combat where opportunity knocks) but if you're grinding XP, you're probably engaging in combat.
At some point, there probably needs to be structures in place that negatively reward killing everybody indiscriminately as well, like bounty hunters being sent directly after you, etc. I really think that the life of the Pirate should be pretty exciting, in that sense.
As intriguing as I find the idea, I cannot see any semblance of fun in the suggestion it's just taking control away from the player and forcing them to rely on the lucky chance that a good person rescues them rather than pirates or someone they're hostile with
Actually, the "ran out of gas" mechanic in EV was a lot
more fun than the current "ran out of gas" mechanic in SS.
Slowly drifting to a star (and may the gods never let that happen to ye more than a few hundred units from a system, it can take a couple of minutes) where you may just get
eaten by a huge fleet you can't fight along the way is a lot more boring and helpless-feeling than using your "emergency broadcast system" and attracting a friendly, if pricey, helper.
The death spiral is mostly a myth. Yes it takes a little time to get used to the system, but once you do its easy to not death spiral.
Wait, no. Last update was mainly about CR rebal and a whole in-game tutorial system, just to fix the problems with 0.6, yo. Note the complete lack of flamey posts these days about this stuff; it got fixed.
Lessons need to be learned there; creating situations where newbs will get Very Dead Very Early should get avoided in the design. The difficulty ramp is a big deal.