I’m wondering why the stations owned by players are 100 times better than the NPC ones?
Are they? They are destructible, that’s a pretty hard downside don’t you think? 
Hiya
Yes sir they are, to my taste at least. I like them so much that I will not dock into another NPC station again unless it’s to pick something up then leave as fast as I can.
Maybe. I guess I’ll just have to make sure I have very little in them and log off in space.
So you mean “visually”? Well, they are newer and much more modern. The NPC stations are mostly decades, if not hundreds of years old.
Hiya
In every way.
For one thing, the billboard ads are smaller and aren’t blindingly in your face like the numerous AIR Program billboards that are all around and impossible to escape.
The PA system is more toned down, less aggravating.
The atmosphere of the stations is more like sci-fi than the NPC ones that look like a game and so more immersive.
The docking animation is better and we’re greeted by a hologram of Aura.
Overall a much better experience than the NPC stations.
Why didn’t the game developers change all the stations like the players owned stations?
Probably because that is some effort they (currently) don’t want to invest time for.
And the Player stations being more appealing is probably a motivation for players to use them, which leads to players needing to collect the resources to build them, doing the jobs to build them, accepting the risks to run them, paying for the fuel they need etc. pp. - it creates content to have them being attractive.
Hiya!
Thank you for your satisfying answer, sir!