I believe I have a theoretical solution to eliminate any concerns over unfair advantages which could be gained from having DC protection in abyssal sites.
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Upon a player disconnect, the state of the site would be frozen until the player reconnects. The player would then receive a short countdown (maybe 10 seconds) before the site resumes to make sure there are no issues with black screen or anything like that.
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A limit on the maximum time for a single disconnection should be 10 minutes, after which, the site will be automatically unfrozen. This would prevent a player from disconnecting indefinitely upon seeing his trace camped by other players.
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Each player is granted a disconnect time bank which resets daily, say 20 minutes. Disconnected time depletes the time bank. After the time bank is depleted, the player no longer receives DC protection for the rest of the day. This would prevent abuse of the previous bullet point by disconnecting and reconnecting in order to try to avoid trace camps. The maximum amount of time a camp would need to wait in theory is 40 minutes rather than 20 minutes.
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For multiplayer sites, the players which are not disconnected can either choose to wait, or manually resume the site and continue without the disconnected player. The players in the site would use a shared time bank.
I believe this would provide a safety net for the vast majority of genuine disconnections and reduce the potential for abuse to an absolute minimum. As mentioned, the small downside is that PVP camps would have to wait slightly longer on average for their kill. But having DC protection would result in more players running sites, and so there are more players to kill for the hunters. Also, many players do not bother with scout alts. Therefore, it is less significant as a downside than some people may believe.
Whatever peoples opinions of safety nets may be, I think it is completely reasonable to expect that no player should lose assets due to a disconnect whenever possible, provided it is not open to abuse.