People keep on saying this. "Once X or Y happens, people will stop grinding and have theatrical battles over territory!" No, they won't. There is literally no reason to fight over one 25km^3 patch of space over another 25km^3 patch of space. Resources, the thing humans have fought over from the beginning of time, are uniformly distributed over incredibly large areas. Not only that, they have an incredibly bad ROI compared to safe zone ore. If company A rolls up and sees company B mining kutonium (if kutonium or any rare ore was worthwhile to mine in the first place), no big deal, the path of least resistance is to just go 100km in a random direction and start up their own mining operation. It'll essentially be similiar density and similar ores and you'll never have to see company A again because they honestly cannot find you in such a vast area. Even if they did find you, any attack would be purely for sport and not for any kind of competition over anything that would give it a deeper meaning (like control over the space or resources) . All this work for stations, capital ships, moon bases, station sieging, none of it fixes this problem, it just gives us the ability to try out the mechanics if we ever get bored for no reason other than just to do it. In the meantime, scores of company vets will continue to stripmine the safezone at Origin (and any other of the hundred safe zones we'll have soon) with World Eaters and Crocs and make money at the fastest rate in the game in complete safety. The faucet will remain on and there will be no sink or drain. No one will leave or risk anything and there's nothing worth fighting over even if they did. That's the reality.
Addressing the reason to fight (i.e., the lack of one and lack of reason to leave the safe zone), to me seems like a prerequisite for cap ships, sieging, all of it. I don't care if that's rare ore clustering, making rare ores more valuable by making them be required in larger volumes during ship or station building, whatever, just some way to funnel people towards more common areas and present a compelling risk vs. reward equation and promote conflict. These changes would be subtle but there seems to be no interest in taking a swing. If done right, it has the cool side effect of providing an economic money sink as ships blow up more, building out a simple but easy to understand gameplay loop, and giving some context and meaning to these grand features they're putting so much of their effort into over the next 3 months. If tools to control and siege and fight over territory dropped in half an hour, we'd all be thinking the same thing for 99% of situations -- "so what?". It's like handing me nice knives and bowls to upgrade my dinners to a whole new level, but no one is hungry and they haven't been for weeks.
Beyond all that, if I had it my selfish way, small scale would get love before large scale, or at least be on the progress notes in parallel so we know it's in the pipe at the same time. Small scale is more accessible to everyone AND on a more regular basis without the requirement of an event-style gathering of people in large companies to siege. Give us radiation tracking and reasons to be outside the safe zone. Kids will run around for hours chasing and evading each other for profits and excitement. The tools for the largest scale conflict seems like it should sit on top of both of these things.