I like the idea of having more than one docking ring on some planets. The planet controlled by Council/Brigands seemed like such a good idea (in terms of development) to allow multiple aspects of a planet to be represented ingame.
I think docking rings should stay - this is not a realistic physics simulation, and they are a part of the original freelancer universe. Discovery aims to extend the vanilla Freelancer gameplay and universe, so we can't just remove things because "they don't make sense from a real-life perspective". This isn't real life.