Listen bro,
I am a highly experienced designer (ironically i am coding a game as we speak) and i have worked as a dev in the industry for two decades (ish).
I have told them many, many times that "most of the players are pve oriented and do not want to be forced into pvp situations, and that high sec needs to be more supportive of that and not force illegal criminal based pvp, and support more group-related pve (like removing the “splitting” of isk income from missions / ratting and giving everyone equal income).
They do not listen.
You are totally right about the game population dropping, but its much worse then you think. Actually around 40% of the population is Alts. So that number of “online” that you see is actually almost half alt accounts. It alone is a serious problem, and complex to deal with because it impacts the games income.
here is the thing, the games design is being pushed by the CSM members to favor pushing new players into nullsec, to feed their empires. Now im a null player and a pvper and i enjoy this part of the game, but as a designer i recognize the serious issues here. The problem is this will never change until ccp wakes up and kicks all of them off the csm for a year or two and fills the entire csm with high sec players, ones advocating removal of suicide ganking and the various types of abuse.
and this is not even touching highly speculative topics like how the retention rates are bad because of massive training times (when the rest of the industry has learned 38 hours from start to finish is the magic number).
The problem is i know the industry standards and i am slightly worried about eve implementing them, but i know its the only chance this game has to live.