I feel the need to tell you that CCP themselves made highsec feel very quiet and lonely. The great decline in local activity started some time in 2013 and got worse and worse until we got what we have now. Systems with lots of people in them and no one talking … and yes, the talking in local made a system feel way more alive already, way more than activity in space could do, ALSO because of the fact that these social interactions have had the tendency to end up as activity in space!
Your desire for more activity in space makes sense, but putting NPCs there shouldn’t be too much of a priority, because - basically - that’s the players’ jobs! You can thank CCP for making space boring. You can thank CCP for creating a situation where people don’t want to randomly talk to each other with whatever outcomes that might bring in space.
What’s a REALLY bad way moving forward is having CCP ruin something and then “fixing” that not by undoing the damage, but instead by building up on the broken thing. Like … they’ve implemented that chat bubble thinking it would get people to talk to each other more. That’s just so absolutely dumb, literally all of the community rejected it for various reasons, the upmost one being that it was a gigantic usability issue.