I understand your position on bumping, but how does it apply to the OP though in your mind? Jump freighters have a direct, hard counter to being bumped - their jump drive. Such a ship has options and game play around it to escape that perhaps some other ships don’t.
Regardless, it seems strange to call a ship with a get-out-of-PvP-free button “helpless” or that the most expensive ship (with the most EHP) that is allowed in highsec is piloted by a “baby seal”. Taking one down under the nose of CONCORD is a costly and nuanced feat, easily avoided by any attention on the part of the hauler pilot.
I don’t get what you are trying to say. CONCORD does a great job at providing a cost and deterrence to illegal aggression in highsec. CCP would be foolish to take it away, nor would anyone who understands the game ask for that.
With CONCORD at your back you have such an overwhelming advantage in highsec that in almost every situation no one would take a fight with you. The exceptions involve making yourself a valuable and/or vulnerable target, but outside that almost no ship is attacked illegally in highsec because of the extreme cost of losing your ship in seconds.
CCP explicitly built the game from the ground up so nowhere is safe, so yes, it is reasonable to make people mind that all the time even if CONCORD means they have all the cards most of the time. As the JF pilot in the OP learned, if you don’t keep that in mind, you may end up another statistic. The complete picture would show he was rather unlucky, and 999 of his fellows behaved equally negligent and didn’t get exploded, but it can happen, and the game is richer for it. That risk provides meaning to our assets, emotions over wins and losses, and reasons to play the game for industrialists to built and replace these virtual assets.
I can’t envision a game mechanic where jump freighters could have balanced fights with other ships given they are specialized for hauling, not combat. Industrial ships can only fight other industrial ships? It sounds like you are asking for hauling ships (and mining ships too I guess) to just to be straight-out immune to player attack in highsec so players don’t have to worry about the other players, which then trivializes the space dimension of the game by making hauling perfectly safe, and completely borks the economy if minerals can be gathered risk-free.
If players would just respect the Golden Rules and just fly what they can afford to loose, there would be a lot less hang-wringing on these forums.