The pirate life is a poor one, far from the blingy ships of the carebears or the null sanctum ratters who now work mostly risk-free. Yes, it was rare for a pirate to actually make a treasure while pvping, but it was possible. People hauling GTC, people moving stuff from null to HS to sell, people coming out of Abyssals with their blingy ships with suspect tags. Yes, this was the allure of pvp. If you were persistent for long enough, eventually you’d catch a whale. And oh, what a glorious adrenaline rush that was.
But with the introduction of interdiction nullifiers for half the ships, no suspect flags for abyssals, instant/non local use of skill injectors and plex, nerfing suicide ganking and gate camping mechanics, EvE is now one of the safer games that you can play. Heck, I remember in Star Wars Galaxies, your jedi would lose WEEKs worth of experience and work if you got killed once. But the penalties for “pveing safely” in EvE have been removed.
CCP now bows to the carebears, bows to the null ratters who own giant swaths of space equal to like 1/4 of the entire map. They cry ‘We’ll Unsubscribe unless you let us amass fortunes with virtually no risk!’ and CCP obliges them because they’re afraid of alienating that player base.
Now you might say “But Omniwing-kun, there’s lots and lots of blingy ships blown up everyday! Just look at that awful killboard zebsite” Yes that is true. But the vast majority of those people WANT to pvp, they’re the small percentage of those null ratters who actually spend their isk on blingy pvp fits. But that is not the point.
Pirating isn’t pvping’ other pvpers. Pirating is pvpinig people that are trying to PVE, and taking their stuff. The higher reward/loot of the PVE, the bigger the risk should be - but not just risk that ‘oh, I’ll die in an abyssal and I’ll lose my pod’, but risk of ‘gee, if I transport 2b isk worth of loot from null to HS, there’s like a 20% chance I can lose it, even if I’m careful’. Now if THAT were the case, there would actually be gatecamps again. But at this point, it’s really not worth it. You can transport stuff from null to Jita at like 99.9% safety, as long as you’re not being lazy and doing everything you should.
This, coupled with making PVE mind-numblingly boring on purpose, is driving CCP’s new business model, which is "Spend real life money on plex, buy expensive pvp ships, skin them, and then blow them up on each other’. They don’t want you making good isk in the game and they certainly don’t want you making isk by taking other people’s stuff anymore.
tl;dr turn back on suspect timers for Abyssal runners