I had a conversation with some friends in the Coalition chat about this not long ago.
Honestly, among other things, one of the key reasons here seems to be that we're pushing the limits on what we can do with the Freelancer engine, so it's becoming unstable, as well as a bit boring. Please, don't compare to Freeworlds either. To do that we'd have to rebuild everything from scratch...
Not to mention that players seem to be more and more inclined to simply find a reason to kill you than do anything interesting or original.
