Now that you guys are basically remaking the dev team, do yourselves, the mod and the community a favor and make sure it doesn't turn into another generation of compartmentalized circlejerk bullshirt. Drop the whole "internal teams" and "lead devs" structure, the only thing that serves is a handful of people's egos, it doesn't do any good for the actual development of the mod or health of the community. Just have one "dev team", with maybe just a couple of more senior devs at the top, and that only to have someone who'd step in to make the final call in case rest of the team is indecisive/in disagreement. 10 brains work better than 1, so just have every dev involved in every discussion, instead of shoving each "team" (read: 1 person who's doing actual work and 2 other people who just pretend to still be around) into their own little isolated corner.
Also, be realistic with the direction and scope of your development goals. Base your decisions around the current state and population of the mod. This isn't 2010 when ModDB was one of the most active gaming hubs, server was always so full people had to queue for 10 minutes to get in, and there was a constant and consistent influx of new players. Let's face the facts - While "exploration" might sound exciting on paper, anyone who's around and actively playing the game has likely already spent thousands of hours F2ing through empty space, so a thousand more hours of that wouldn't be this "exciting new experience" for them, and as for attracting new players, the limit of what you can possibly do with this 20 year old engine is so underwhelming that you can't possibly attract a substantial audience no matter how much effort you put into adding pretty and exciting little nuggets to different corners of the map. Even if you manage to pull a miracle and somehow add "exploration elements" enticing enough to actually make people log in to check them out, it'll do little in terms of player retention, because people will just go check it out once and that's about it, no more reason to log again.
What the server needs at this point is more deliberately handcrafted hotspots and bottlenecks to make spontaneous player interaction more readily available (because that way, people will know for sure "if I go to system A or camp lane B, I'll always find someone to interact with and won't be wasting my time"). While having 500+ viable trade routes and 50+ systems with at least half a dozen ways of entering and exiting each might sound like a positive, one look at the average playercount makes it painfully clear that the only thing it does is harms the server, as it makes it much harder to find actual interactions ingame. So the starchart doesn't need to be expanded, and player activity doesn't need to be spread out. The actual need of the server in it's current state is the exact opposite: Starchart needs to be shrunk down, with a considerable number of systems and trade routes removed/merged, travel times reduced and actual player activity deliberately funneled into a handful of specific spots around the map (which can then rotate around periodically to keep things fresh).
The current starchart was specifically designed for a 200+ player server, so nowadays with the existing population, If I have a ship parked in system A and I check the playerlist and see a bunch of people in system B, chances are I'm not even gonna bother logging in, because I know the most likely outcome is going to be me F2ing through empty space for 20 minutes, and by the time I actually get there those players will likely be already long gone. Imho that's the main factor that needs to be fixed, and it's the main factor that's been in dire need of a fix for years now but none of the recent dev team have even bothered looking in that general direction because they were all too distracted with that grand vision of a glorious mod with sprawling playerbase, which let's be real, won't be happening no matter how hard you imagine it.
tl;dr - Develop the mod according to what it is, not what we all wish it would've been.
