There is literally zero difference in favour of barge over a 5k. The time it takes to fly a barge across Sirius, you can fly a 5k 7 or 8 times in the same route, given NPC's spinning you, the ridiculously slow speed in which it moves, a minute and a half to engage cruise speed to a maximum of 100, Pirates who log, take 50ish+ M off you then log for all of 3 minutes "work" of their F1'd char in space. A barge also has to deal with the fact it costs about 110M to buy Ores from bases at current PoB owners set prices- a risk when blown up leaving around 3k units for the destroying party.
Let's assume barges take things faster, which they don't:
A barge taking however many units from your PoB if you are a miner is actually a good thing, your revenue pot from which to earn is then increased. You mine, you fill the PoB, you get your credits for doing so.
Now, if PoB's could be fixed to buy items for less then they sell them for, that would be perfect and a PoB owner could finally have a reason to allow the base to exist.
If a PoB owner wants to stock a little ore for themselves to ship, they can do so by setting numbers to sell/keep etc.
I'm sure that 100% of PoB's which stock ore are also filled by their owners.
Allowing each storage module to have a larger capacity would be a fantastic idea as a whole- or different types of storage which cost more to build depending on the capable capacity, or more modules per core.
The reasons Ore sells for so much is because it has to be mined, player time which goes into it.
