Here's my "hot take" as a response to the direction you want to take things here. Since official factions have no impact on the development of the story and lore and all that (since there's no difference between official and unofficial/indies in lore) you can do the following:
Have staff create an official faction for every ID, that is open to the public, that anyone can assume leadership of. Said leadership is passed down to whoever the members in the faction want, whenever they feel that the leader is not doing well, or the leader has left. (Staff can also intervene to shut down harmful cliques) The ID can be modified upon request and review to fit inline with the current actions said OF is taking. This method is pretty pressure free for the players who run and participate in the OF.
This method works well in many games where conflict of interest arises, and unofficial factions which are player created, can still branch off and do other things. After all official factions are the "representation of the NPC faction and ID" by your own words.
Now an argument can be made that you'd be taking away more ability from the players, but lets be honest, do we need more than one official faction for most non-generic IDs? No, the game has more factions than the server has players during peak hours. We don't need 4 Liberty navy official factions, we need one that isn't a closed friend group. (Which is most OF's besides maybe something like DTR) Also, its not like us players have any say in what happens story wise anyway, which in my opinion is the entire purpose for a "Official Faction" otherwise your just another dude with another tag.
For a good few factions, they've never even had an OF, meaning there's been no quality direction control, or even player interest for said factions, and if something like this isn't implemented, there never will be player interest for those factions.
Oh but one more thing.
Actually play the game. No ones going to log in unless you log in, yes we're all thinking about you, and how we want to play with you, so do it.
Anyway I'm going back to drinking excessive amounts of maple syrup, stay safe out there folks.
