The problem with large issues being looked at as separately fixable parts, with long periods of time between them, is that you end up making things worse. Look at the Monthly Economic Reports and try to make something out of it. You’ll realize that by the end of the year Goons will have netted 100 Trillion ISK in Bounties and 150+ Trillion in Minerals from their activities in Delve. While this is not a problem in itself, it is a problem in the context of other issues with the game. Botting - another such issue. While banning botters is happening as far as we’ve heard, player reports (and my own findings) suggest that this is still happening on a large scale, simply because it is possible and viable. You could say that CCP supports the types of profits Goons are currently making in order to motivate more people to adapt the same playstyle, start empires in Nullsec and thus make the game more lively and news-worthy. Fair point, just that it doesn’t happen for a number of other game-related issues. Well, not only game-related, also people related, but the first one can be shaped. If you say “others could do the same”, you are not seeing that Goons and Botters can do this due to profitting from specific circumstances in which profits from now defunct mechanics allow them to rat and mine in relative safety (economically speaking). Others simply can’t do that now. If they want and try, they’ll only run into a wall. People who are asking to nerf Bounties or Rorquals essentially ask for the 250+ Trillion, that Goons made this year alone, to be buffed in relation to those, who might want to try and do the same in the future.
Once there will be a fix for such large issues it normally just means that the problems it caused will be manifest, rather than deleted. When CCP turned moon-mining from passive™ to active™, they reinforced the economic strength of those, who made profits with passive™ mining and could use these to further their operations. The ones that started now to mine with actual mining ships, face a massive time-sink for making similar profits and thereby can never use moon profits in the same way the elder generation used to. When you think about ISK and ressources not just as means to buy SKINs, but to actually re-invest in strategic goals, you’ll immediately see the problem that arises. Every individual fix in the context of a larger issue, can dramatically escalate the issue as a whole.
Why do you think the largest of groups in EVE didn’t complain about the moon mining changes? They’ve made profits from it for so many years, that they could be rather happy about the changes. Their income has been retroactively buffed, as in: newer generations will not be able to make the Trillions over Trillions in the same easy way and thus will have a much harder time building up that Super Fleet, building up their Alliances, grabbing a foothold in the game of null etc. If they try to recompensate for their disadvantage with extra high workload, they now can be easily stopped from mining their moons altogether.
Once an issue has left its footprint in the economic system of EVE, a direct fix will only make things worse.
Finally I will say this: CCP’s slogan to HTFU while being a nice idea, turns out to be reality nothing but a Staying Parole. Just like the “from dishwasher to milliionaire” idea in real life. No one escapes real life, but people who realize that the structural disadvantage in EVE, while being a game, is permanent, could sooner or later lose interest in the game. To compare with other games: in chess you’d sometimes chose to play at a disadvantage in order to keep the game interesting for both the advanced and the not so experienced player. In EVE this difference is set the other way around and thanks to mechanics that always exist for a few years before they are “fixed” and that can be built upon by the already rich, the difference is perpetualized. While that is close to how real life power dynamics work, it bears the question of wether or not it makes a “sandbax” game quite too predictable over time.
To compare: what is a state in real life? Something like a body of institutions which are often semi-democratically controlled but more importantly justified. Let’s say you have a reasonably high amount of people in the real world who would like to give themselves a new such body, because they are unhappy with the current one. In theory they could do so, because democracy, because the basic idea of what a state is. In reality it doesn’t happen, once the division of the turf is settled (after world wars and such). People trying to create new states now will 100% fail (Catalonia, Kurdistan, Uyghurs) unless it is in the direct interest of other, bigger players (Ukraine, the division of Yugoslavia etc.). In EVE, we are not quite there yet, but we already have all the preconditions for a more or less settled division of the cake - all without the complexity and speed of development in real life economics, and the real need to make more and more profit. For a game like EVE to not end up stale over time it either needs exponential growth of its complexity, players not only using mechanics but creating, controlling and changing them on the fly and / or a real economic pressure on everyone. The latter is a basic problem in EVE, since “just being here” doesn’t cost anything and thus destruction or people quitting are the only ways to get accumulated wealth out of the system again. Keeping the crews of various ships alive doesn’t cost anything for instance. If that would be part of a bigger change of the game, it could make things interesting again. The same goes for invention and production. There is no technological progress that isn’t set as a fix set of rules being implemented by the game designers. T3Cs are a small step into the right direction, but in the larger context of things still far too limited and in the end only a drop of water on the hot stone.
A complete relaunch might be a bad idea regarding current players willingness to take the step, but the current way of approaching issues is just buying time.