Too long thread, skimmed most of it.
Main points I found to be important and would have the biggest impact in players being serious and not farming FW:
Rewarding loyalty to one faction. Any race can join any faction. (I have one of each race but Gallente forever mfer’s.) But once a faction is joined, that character gets better rewards over time. If they switch, and each time they switch, a damage penalty stacks to how long it takes to get good rewards.
Dont worry about warp stabs. If you get more people involved ding dongs with instalock ships will organically appear and solve warp stab problems.
Do something, anything about just sitting and waiting at a becon to capture it. Something like a having to deploy/destroy a main faction sov mod to cap/defend. Mobile depot time to deploy, lvl IV rat bs amount of hp to destroy across all tiers of sites.
Give bonuses to make every system worth taking/defending. When contested give defenders an offense bonus. Give attackers a defense bonus. Something kinda equal to balance it so its worth it to both sides.
Really dont have to worry about farmers if more people show up to work for good rewards. Fix the low active population and the farmer problem will dry up organically because they dont want to be easy content for X number of new pilots looking to change the map.
I dont care about the sec status of systems changing. Eventually one faction would win and they would gain more hisec systems causing problems with lore and the eventual decline of an entire race. Yes it would be more realistic but would contribute to a “lets do the same thing to null” attitude and the decline of an entire race in the game due to lost space. Keep the FW systems fluid so you keep fighting for high rewards keeping the farmers at bay and keep the opposition fighting to gain the big rewards.
Last but not least (getting tired of writting this in my phone) keep FW active in hisec. One, content. Two, get stories about getting content. Three, espinoge and spies and it f’n war dude. Youre gonna be a target for anybody in the opposing factions anywhere you go. Youre not gonna be safe from them even in faction home systems.