It all comes down to your inability to take the other sides POV, to understand the other sides motivation, Merin.
In everything people do there are 2 kinds of motivations. Intrinsic motivation involves doing something because it’s personally rewarding to you. Extrinsic motivation involves doing something because you want to earn a reward or avoid punishment.
Intrinsic motivation is described by SDT theory.
Self-determination theory (SDT ) is a macro theory of human motivation and personality that concerns people’s inherent growth tendencies and innate psychological needs.
Autonomy. Desire to be causal agents of one’s own life and act in harmony with one’s integrated self; however, this does not mean to be independent of others.
Competence. Seek to control the outcome and experience mastery.
Relatedness. Will to interact with, be connected to, and experience caring for others.
This relates to everything in peoples lives, family, job, hobbies, games. If it satisfies your psychological needs (autonomy, competense, relatedness) you will be intrinsically motivated to engage in it. If something does not, but the reward is good, or at least you dont get punished, you’ll feel miserable, but still you might be extrinsically motivated to do it. If neither apply, you wont be motivated at all.
I think there’s also place for some long term goals to play a role.
Both PVE and PVP players satisfy their need for autonomy by making a choice of time and place of engagements, corps, fleets, ships and fittings.
Both PVE and PVP players satisfy need for competence by learning ship piloting skills, ship and module attributes, learning site layouts, triggers ans spawns.
PVE players satisfy relatedness by bringing the loot to the market for other players to use. PVP players satisfy relatedness by interacting with their target, trashtalking in local, etc. Group players both PVE and PVP satisfy relatedness by being in the fleet.
The way I see it OP is being denied his autonomy by him not being able to chose time, place, ship and fitting anymore. Being denied competence as those gangs prepare to make themselves uncatchable. Being denied relatedness because it’s a no-win situation for everybody, attackers moved on, defenders lost time.
No reward means no positive extrinsic motivation. Negative motivation of not getting punished only works for limited number if times before reaction gets dull and is no longer effective.
If the only effective counterplay to anything is tethering, docking up or logging off, I think it’s on CCP to blame. They stopped adding tools, the sand to the sandbox.
I think deployable structures to deny filamenting in and/or out is a great idea. Which can still be countered by attackers by using gates and WHs.