The mechanic is already implemented and in game, all we need is a larger version of it where we could send player ships to.
What do you mean? The despawning of the ship on a landing pad is there. The despawning of the asteroids on collection module is there. The demolition job hall is there. There's no mechanics that would tie it all together to allow to send the ship somewhere where it can be salvaged with the reward being higher than what it costs to just sell the ship. That's also raises the questions of, who gets the money for the ship? If a player who brought the ship gets the money, then where the money would come from for the player who demolishes it? If a player demolishing the ship gets the money, then why would anyone bring the ship there instead of selling it? And if the player that brings the ship is the only one who can demolish it and gets all the money, is it actually worth it to develop that mechanic, and how long would that take?
This seem to be one of the cases where you might assume something is very easy to do without the internal knowledge of how it is actually done. Just look over the latest updates to various ship-player interactions that being developed and how long it does actually take. Because of that, I'm highly skeptical of the prospect for developing this mechanic, because it is a bandaid for the more simple principle of simply salvaging the ships as is, which I have already said depends solely on the value of salvage. Such a suggestion should consider how would that play out with the refining already being in place.
Since right now the Thruster of a ship is more or less a 1:1 value of the ores used to manufacture it, it is much easier and more profitable to just mine the ores compared to looking for the wrecks and taking off the most valuable parts, not even speaking about bringing everything together to the station. Once the refining mechanics will be in place and you would likely need 2-10 units of ore just to obtain 1 unit of refined material (depending on the method of refining and the use of catalysts), the value of ships will increase significantly, making this proposed mechanic redundant. Given how some of the interesting and viable principles were seemingly scrapped in favor of the new approaches, I seriously want FB to avoid putting effort into these ideas that might end up being useless.
Lets just start with the Demolition job actually paying well compared to a much simpler and yet much more profitable mining job and some of the discarded player ship designs being used there, instead of the derelicts that are built using Attachment Plates long gone from the game, which would also make Cutting Laser a viable tool for the job.