I won't offer you any suggestions as I haven't played for a while but I can offer you feedback of a person who quit shortly after 5.0.
I was a Kusari main, I didn't play anything outside of the house. KuDessie was my main ship for RP purposes and while I wasn't a PvP ace, I enjoyed playing it greatly. I never had an intention of being a PvP god and mostly played for the RP and sometimes just flying the ship and doing PvE missions and PVP whenever I could find it in my weird timezone. Things were ok even if RP was stagnant at times.
After 5.0 the "fun" of even simply flying a cruiser and even doing silly missions was gone. The system was more polished, more mechanically complex, and objectively superior to the one we had had before, but it was less fun. And I play the game for fun, not appreciating a new system's complexity. Not to be a hypocrite, I tested it, I learnt it and got decent with it but the "fun" never returned.
Similarly, the uniqueness of factions was never there. Like Godslayer pointed out, there ought to be some "oomph" to the factions both RP-wise and gameplay-wise. After a while, it just gets boring that everything is roughly the same, so save for RP fleur, all factions are the same. I still remember playing Coalition battlecruiser back in the day, it was the ship that got me playing disco in the first place and starting SCEC many years ago just for that purpose. Now it's just another bland BCR with 4 appendages that serve no purpose.
I recently returned to fly my old ships for a bit, testing the changes and seeing the RP. Upon logging in and flying for a bit, I came to the same conclusion I had when I quit — it simply was not fun, so even tho I am technically still within the KuGov and there is an ongoing Kusari-related event, I simply have no incentive to log because gameplay is not fun, and the lack of desire to do any RP follows.
I am not here to bash the balance team which I think did a monumental task introducing so many details to the equation. However, I do want the team to also think about the opinion of some people above, particularly new players, that also mirrors mine, that despite the new system being flashed out and complex, it is simply boring and not enticing. In Russian language there is a term related to gamedev called "vasyanstvo" referring to the tendency of devs (including mod devs) to overcomplicate a simple gameplay with details either on the basis of introducing "realism" or "to make things deeper" to improve the gameplay. However, the term has a strongly negative connotation because such games become too tedious/boring/complex/all of the aforementioned to play. There needs to be a balance.
I apologise for not bringing any suggestions but I do hope that a feedback from a person who quit over the rework can provide you with extra input on your further work. Who knows, maybe one day I will log in again to test the changes and will love them. For now, I would rather not spend my time on something that is simply not fun.
